Good morning…
Going through old boxes of old stuff in our basement, I came across this old card. I chuckle every time I look at the butterfly driving a car with a caterpillar on her driver’s license. She sheepishly tells the officer, who has pulled her over, “That’s an old photo.”
This old card came to me when I was cocooned in my deepest time of depression, when I was being transformed by the changing circumstances of my daily life. It must be painful to die as a caterpillar, to cocoon with the Creator for as long as it takes, before emerging as a butterfly, forever changed, eternally free. This symbolically is what I was experiencing at the time I received the card, dying to the life of my dreams, held tight in the dark unknown, before evolving into the growing person God designed me to be.
After reading yesterday’s blog post, Is Change Good?, I got a text from my old friend Dr. Cathy Snapp, co-author of The Hidden Life Awakened. “Your wonderful post today made me think of Bettina wisdom,” wrote Cathy, referring to the deep wisdom of our spiritual mentor, Christian mystic Betty Skinner. “She said to us a million times: CHANGE AND GROWTH ARE SYNONYMOUS.”
“So true,” I responded. “And my first therapist used to say, “Sue, you’re either going to grow straight or you’re going to grow bent, depending upon how much you resist the force of life.”
Leaning into God, the force of life, we read again a key verse about change. Now all of us, with our faces unveiled, reflect the glory of the Lord as if we are mirrors; and so we are being transformed, metamorphosed, into His same image from one radiance of glory to another, just as the Spirit of the Lord accomplishes it (2 Corinthians 3:18, ESV). This passage describes a gradual, progressive process of spiritual transformation where the Holy Spirit changes us to be more like Christ over time, rather than all at once.
So, what will it be for me today? Grow straight up toward the light of God or grow bent beneath the dark weight of this world. Moment by moment, we have a choice. Grow straight or grow bent? Crawl like a caterpillar or, bit by bit, become a Bettina-like butterfly?
…Sue…
P.S. I realize I have been wrestling with change and growth the majority of my adult life. And just now, God, the force of life, draws me back a short post I created in July of 2022, and I laugh at the opening cartoon, We’re Supposed to Change.
