Saba Malik 27 August 2010 Mind Like Water 2 Comments Print This Post  Email This Post

IMAGE © Randy M. Ury/Corbis

Excerpt from Awaken the Giant Within

One day, when my son Joshua was about six years old, he came home crying hysterically because one of his friends fell off some playground equipment at school and died. I sat down with Josh and said, “Honey, I know how you feel. You miss him, and you should feel those feelings. But you should also realize that you feel this way because you’re a caterpillar.” He said, “What?” I had broken his pattern a little bit. I said, “You’re thinking like a caterpillar.” He asked me what I meant.

“There’s a point,” I said, “where most caterpillars think that they have died. They think life has ended. When is that?” He said, “Oh yeah, when that thing starts wrapping around them.” I said, “Yeah, pretty soon the caterpillar gets wrapped in its cocoon, buried by all this stuff. And you know what? If you were to open up that cocoon, the caterpillar is no longer there. There’s just all this mush and goo and stuff. And most people, including the caterpillar, thinks it’s dying. But really it’s beginning to transform. Do you understand? It is going from one thing to something else. And pretty soon, what does it become?” And he said, “A butterfly.”

I asked, “Can the other little caterpillars on the ground see that this caterpillar became a butterfly?” He said, “No.” I said, “And when a caterpillar breaks out of the cocoon, what does he do?” Joshua said, “He flies.” I said, “Yeah, he gets out and the sunlight dries off his wings and he flies. He’s even more beautiful than when he was a caterpillar. Is he more free or less free?” Josh said, “He’s much more free.” And I said, “Do you think he’ll have more fun?” And he said, “Yeah-he’s got less legs to get tired!” And I said, “That’s right. He does. He doesn’t need legs anymore; he’s got wings. I think your friend has wings now.

“You see, it’s not for us to decide when somebody becomes a butterfly. We think it’s wrong, but God has a better idea when the right time is. Right now, it’s winter and you want it to be summer, but God has a different plan. Sometimes we just have to trust that God knows how to make butterflies better than we do. And when we’re caterpillars, we don’t even realize that butterflies exist, because they’re up above us-but maybe we should just remember that they’re there.” And Joshua smiled, gave me a big hug and said, “I bet he’s a beautiful butterfly.”

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