Recently I read these words from Elisabeth Elliot on God's overarching Providence.
"The plan of God for our lives includes all of our circumstances, our entire heredity, every detail of our environment, each decision we make, all the decisions of others, absolutely everything. He can make even the wrath of man to praise Him--or any discomfiting circumstance.
"For Mark Twain in the winter of 1887, it was bad weather. He had anticipated a getaway with his wife Livy, who would come to him in New York from Hartford, Connecticut and then go with him for a brief holiday in Washington:
"And so, after all my labor and persuasion to get you to at last promise to take a week's holiday adn go off with me on a lark, this is what Providence has gone and done about it. A mere simple request to you to stay at home would have been entirely sufficient: but no, that is not big enough, picturesque enough--a blizzard's the idea: pour down all the snow in stock, turn loose all the winds, bring a whole continent to a stand-still: that is Providence's idea of the correct way to trump a person's trick. Dear me, if I had known it was going to make all this trouble and cost all these millions, I never would have said anything about your going to Washington.
"Our perspective is so limited. We keep forgetting that God's love does not show itself only in protection from suffering. It is of a different nature altogether. His love does not hate tragedy. It never denies reality. It stands firm in the teeth of suffering. The love of God did not protect His own Son from death on a cross. That was the proof of His love, though 'legions of angels' might have rescued Him. He will not necessarily protect us--not from anything it takes to make us like Jesus. A lot of hammering and chiseling and purifying by fire will have to go into the process. Through it all, we learn to trust Him in every little thing" (Elisabeth Elliot, Be Still My Soul, 52-54).
Thank You, Lord, for Your utter, all-pervasive sovereignty. Thank You for Your unflinching love. Thank You for not shrinking from doing whatever it takes to make us like Jesus. Thank You for reason to thank You, no matter what, because, no matter what, if we are in Christ we are better off than we deserve to be. Thank You for sweetening trials with celebrations, beauty, loved ones, and laughter. Through it all, grant us grace to trust You in every little thing, because of Jesus. Amen.
A blessed Thanksgiving to you and yours, dear Crumbles!
If you subscribe to this blog by e-mail, you may have noticed that the video portions were missing from the post you received yesterday. Since videos are not normally part of this blog, I don't know why that happened. If you would like to view them, please access the "Caterpillar Chronicles" post on the crumbs from His table website: http://www.crumbsfromhistable.com/2016/11/caterpillar-chronicles.html . I apologize for the inconvenience. There's always a knowledge gap when trying something new. :) Thanks for your patience!
The technical difficulties with the video embedding have been resolved, thanks be to God. If you are having trouble viewing them in your e-mail or RSS reader, please view on the blog here: http://www.crumbsfromhistable.com/2016/11/caterpillar-chronicles.html .
Here at Wits' End, we have bugs in our kitchen. On purpose.
To be more specific, we are providing temporary homes for a cohort of monarch caterpillars. Would you like to meet them?
Since we don't know how to distinguish gender at the caterpillar stage, we chose to name them by the phonetic alphabet: Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Echo, and Foxtrot. After the above video was made, we discovered that an egg must have come in on the milkweed leaves, because we had a Golf, too.
Earlier in the fall, our milkweed held a dozen monarch caterpillars, but none survived to maturity. November is late in the migration season for new caterpillars to appear, but there these were, and we wanted to give them a chance to fulfill their life cycle.
And we wanted a chance to watch.
In the process, I am learning much more than I expected about caterpillars and change. The only transformations I had ever heard about were from caterpillar to chrysalis to butterfly, but the truth is even richer in application to the Christian's journey of sanctification.
The monarch's life cycle begins as an egg, which looks as little like a butterfly as a seed does a flower. It grows into a very tiny caterpillar, which eats very tiny holes in the milkweed leaves. The tiniest at our first notice was 1/4" long.
It eats and eats and grows and grows, until it outgrows its skin and molts. Then it eats its old skin before returning to the milkweed diet. Yes, really. Nothing is wasted in God's economy.
Again it eats and eats and grows and grows, until it outgrows its skin and molts. And eats the shell of its former self. And eats and eats and grows and grows and... Well, you get the idea. Our part of the process is replacing the milkweed and cleaning the jars regularly to prevent disease.
The caterpillar undergoes several of these transformations, but time after time it sheds its old caterpillar skin, only to reveal a new caterpillar beneath.
All the while, it is fully and completely a monarch butterfly in larval form.
Sometimes I think I know how that feels. From the moment of my salvation, I have been completely "in Christ," and He in me. My identity is fully and completely His blood-bought child (Gal. 2:20). The New Testament teaches that I am and have been sanctified, "perfected," even (1 Cor. 6:11; Hebrews 10:10, 14). It also teaches that I "am being sanctified" and have not yet laid hold of that for which Christ laid hold of me (Hebrews 10:14; Philippians 3:12).
By the grace of God, I feed on His Book, prayer, worship, and the fellowship of the saints. I grow and grow. Sometimes it looks like nothing is happening for a while, and sometimes there's a painful growth spurt which strips me of some part of the old me, what Paul calls "the flesh" or "the old man."
Yet underneath, my caterpillarishness remains.
This is where Amore laughed and said, "So how exactly does eating its own skin fit into the spiritual parallel?"
Initially, I said that it's a parable, not an allegory, and we make trouble when we try to squeeze every little detail for meaning in a parable. On second thought, I realized that God wastes nothing from our past experience. He causes even my sins and flesh patterns to work together for good and His glory. He's that masterful. Every bit of the old me that I shed has some part to play in my future growth and fruitfulness, perhaps in increasing humility and conscious, abject dependence on the Lord, perhaps in equipping me to communicate His grace to someone else struggling or suffering as I have.
But I digress.
The caterpillars grow and grow and transform incrementally. After some days of this cycle, they stop eating and become restless. Eventually, they stretch out to their full length, upside down, on a somewhat horizontal surface like a twig or the top of the enclosure and remain motionless for hours.
During that time, they are making and attaching a tiny pad of sticky silken thread to which to attach themselves for pupation, the transformation from caterpillar to chrysalis. The caterpillar extrudes a small bundle of prickly black spines from its tail end. After embedding these securely into the silk pad, it hangs by its tail in a "J" shape. The whole arrangement looks far too fragile to stake a life upon.
They hang there, nearly motionless, for around 24 hours (in the case of our first 4 transformations). During that time, the white stripes take on a greenish tinge and the caterpillar seems to grow fatter. We are learning that when the "J" relaxes into a straighter line and the antennae dangle limply, the transformation is about to happen.
Waves of muscle contractions visibly move upward from the head to the tail. These build until the final veneer of caterpillar skin splits behind the head. The rupture extends upward, the caterpillar scrunches off the too-tight skin, and a pupa much larger than the caterpillar emerges. The only analogies I've thought of from human life are inching off a compression sleeve or a pair of nylons at the end of a summer day and a surgeon cutting clothing away from an injured limb.
If you wish to watch the seven-minute process, here's the video we took of Alpha's pupation:
Monarch pupa
Contrary to my expectations, monarch caterpillars do not spin or even secrete a cocoon. The chrysalis that houses the adult butterfly grows inside the caterpillar and has only to come out. In so doing, the breach with its old caterpillar life is complete and irrevocable.
Over the next several hours, this pupa contracts and hardens into a beautiful, jade-green chrysalis with gold markings. Two gold dots at the bottom cover the butterfly's eyes within. The caterpillar is no more, but the butterfly remains enshrouded for days to come.
Reportedly, if the chrysalides stay healthy, we should have 4 adult monarch butterflies emerging over several days, beginning around Thanksgiving. We will do our best, God helping us, to keep the remaining small caterpillars alive as long as the milkweed holds out. The adult butterflies will need up to a day for their wings to harden. Then we can release them into the garden. If the weather remains warm and gentle enough, they may reunite with the rest of their number in their wintering grounds in Mexico.
My transformation and yours will be measured in longer terms than days. The exact day and hour God knows. We who are in Christ Jesus by grace through faith can rest assured, however, that a day will come when we put off our caterpillarishness for good and find our wings. No longer hindered by that "old man" or "old woman," we will be like our Lord, for we shall see Him as He is, and what a glorious day that will be (1 John 3:2).
Lord willing, there will soon be a sequel to this post with our batch of butterflies. Until then, keep growing, my crumble friends. Crawl on, and don't lose heart. Your change is coming.
This has been truly a banner year for butterflies in our garden. On any given day last month, we could look out our kitchen window to see a dozen or more butterflies fluttering in the Turk's cap, butterfly weed, and milkweed.
Long-time crumbles will know that butterflies are special to me. The Lord has often used their beauty, presence, delicate diversity, and metamorphosis to encourage me. If I look at my circumstances and those of my loved ones over the last 6 months, there is plenty of reason for discouragement. Many beloved activities are physically unattainable for me right now, but thankfully the Lord brings new butterflies to visit on the most downcast days. They remind me to look to the Lord and His work and to persist in praising and thanking Him in the midst of the challenges.
So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal. (2 Corinthians 4:16-18 ESV)
The gulf frittilaries were the first to arrive en masse, back in August and September when the lantana still bloomed in the back garden.
We even had more than a dozen monarch caterpillars, but none survived even to chrysalis stage. They have many natural enemies. Perhaps next year we'll bring one or two inside to shelter and observe.
We relished the sight of our first giant swallowtail, who very graciously lingered for a few dozen photos.
The dainty queens mingle with the monarchs, but they are smaller, with more polka-dots.
Even smaller, the grey hairstreaks brightened up all the orange and black.
Ventral wing
Dorsal wing
The pipevine swallowtails were pretty hyperactive, but one finally consented to still in the Turk's cap and on the blackberry bush to smile prettily for the camera.
Only last week we learned to distinguish between the American lady
How glorious, gracious, and kind of our Creator to give us such beauty and variety of these beautiful insects. They fulfill the important purpose of assisting the bees in pollination so that the plants we and our planet need can grow and reproduce. He could have made them plain and monotone, but he made more kinds than I've ever seen and painted even the tiniest ones with intricate and colorful patterns. He could have given us eyes only able to see in shapes and shades of grey, but He gave us vision for color and detail as well. Everywhere His creation, even in this groaning, fallen form, testifies to His goodness and majesty.
