The Legend of the Butterfly

July 2, 2023

In a time long, long ago, in a place far, far away, massive planning was taking place. God and the angels were working out what kind of animals needed to be created to populate a newly created planetoid circling a mid-sized sun in the solar system of a spiral galaxy. The angels tasked with reviewing God’s long-term plans as Creator had brought forth a helpful suggestion. They noted that the project would use the words “you must be born again” to guide the highest beings in this world to find access to an intimate relationship with God. They feared that being born again would seem highly strange to these creatures. They would see this wording as requiring one to enter again into the womb of their mothers and be reborn. That would require a considerable stretch of their imagination. The brilliant insight of the angels was that perhaps an animal could be configured to illustrate this principle. Maybe they could design an animal with such a rebirth as part of its life cycle! This might serve as a great illustration of what God meant about being born again.

What they had in mind made even the Creator smile at their ingenuity. It was so improbable yet perfectly illustrated His idea of the new birth. He immediately ordered their words to be turned into reality.

And so it was that a novel new step was added into the lifespan of the lowly caterpillar. The creeping worm would set aside all its desires to munch on succulent plants at some point. It would leave everything it held dear behind it and spin itself into an apparently lifeless chrysalis. Inside that cocoon, some magic would occur. A fantastic transformation would occur, changing the hairy worm's lumbering bulk into a butterfly's sleek fluttering body. The angels had even devised a new word to describe what they were trying to illustrate, metamorphosis! The caterpillar’s body would be so dramatically reordered that one could no longer see its relationship with the butterfly. All of its desires in life would also be altered. No longer was it drawn to the leafy vegetation. Now its eyes were focused on finding the brilliance of flowers and the sweetness of nectar. It had been born again, a perfect illustration, right there in nature, of the beautiful transformation that the angels knew God wanted for His own creatures who would follow the path of being born again! One can almost picture Jesus, in The Gospel of John, chapter three, leading Nicodemus into a garden, pointing to a butterfly poised on the lip of a beautiful lily and saying to him, “This, my dear friend, is what I mean by being born again. This is experiencing life more abundantly, now and into eternity!”