A Butterfly Story

There once was a little girl who loved to run through the fields and play.  One day, amidst her wanderings, she stumbled across the cocoon of a butterfly.   Delighted at her find she raced home with it and watched for the beautiful creature within to emerge. 

One day a small opening appeared along the shell.  Crouching down over the butterfly home which she had created, the little girl prepared to wait and watch as a new life came into the world.  For several hours she waited patiently and watched as her butterfly struggled to break out of its confines.  With great effort it struggled to force its body through that little hole, its progress painfully slow.  Then, after some time, the butterfly seemed to give up, as if it had gotten as far as it could and it could go no further.

It was then that the little girl decided to help her struggling butterfly.  With tender care she took a pair of scissors and snipped off the remaining bits of the cocoon.  With renewed vigor the butterfly climbed out of its enclosure easily. 

The little girl was so delighted to see the little bit of pattern that was visible on the butterfly’s crumpled wings and waited for them to dry out.  She expected that, at any moment, its swollen body would push fluid out to the wings, enlarging and expanding them so that they could support its body.  But as she kept guard over it late into the night, neither of these things ever happened.  And as the hours passed into days, the little girl watched as her beautiful butterfly spent the rest of its life crawling around with a swollen body and shriveled wings inside her butterfly house, never able to fly.

See, what that little girl, in all her kindness and excited haste, did not understand was that the restricting cocoon, and the struggle required for the butterfly to get through the tiny opening, were God's way of forcing fluid from the body of the butterfly into its wings so that it would be ready for flight once it achieved its freedom.

What that little girl did not know was that sometimes struggles are exactly what we need in our lives. If God allowed us to go through our lives without any obstacles, it would cripple us. We would not be as strong as what we could have been, and we could never fly.