Easter...Eggs, Caterpillars, Butterflies, Meaning...and purpose.

We got Emma a butterfly garden for her birthday and ordered five little caterpillars. We have been watching them grow and it has been such a fun and interesting experience. These caterpillars started out so small, but they have grown and they have now entered what is called the pupal stage (so we read in the "instructions").  Four of them have attached themselves to the top of the cup and the final one has already built a cocoon. We will continue to wait and watch as they tranform into something beautiful.

I would like to say that I was thinking all along of relating this metaphorphasis experience to the Easter story. However, it just dawned on me last night, when we were all watching the cocoon in amazement, that it is truly a miracle that God transforms caterpillars into butterflies...and a miracle that He can take a sinner and transform our life to glorify and honor Him....a miracle that He transforms our earthly bodies into heavenly beings and of course, the greatest miracle..that He took the dead body of Jesus and transformed him into a resurrection body.

So...I decided to get on the internet and search for a story that would better tell it than I could and here is what I found from the "Sermons from Seattle" website.

"There was a caterpillar crawling across a Persian carpet, a Persian rug. And the caterpillar crawled for what he thought was seventy-five years. He was just crawling all over that Persian rug, but he could see only one color at a time. He saw first the blues, and then the oranges, the yellows, the reds, the purples, the deep violets, the greens. He saw one color at a time and said: “O, what a beautiful world I am on. Look at all that color!” He lived for what he thought was a very long time, 50, 60, 70, 80 years, a blink in God’s time but long for the caterpillar. And finally, he crawled off the Persian carpet and he became a cocoon. He became a cocoon and hibernated. Although he didn’t realize it, the cocoon was part of the miracle, and then there was another miracle and he came out of the cocoon as a butterfly, a monarch butterfly. He fluttered up higher and higher and higher and he looked down at the Persian rug for the first time and saw it in its total magnificent splendor. What a sight he saw. For the first time in his existence, he saw the meaning of his whole life; he saw the past and the present like he had never seen it before. …

"The purpose of Easter is the victory celebration that tells of the Power of God that took the dead body of Jesus of Nazareth and transformed him, metamorphasized him, transfigured him into a glorious resurrection body. The purpose of Easter is God telling the Truth that God can create life out of apparent death. The purpose of Easter is to convince us that creepy, crawly caterpillars become transformed into butterflies. The purpose of Easter is to convince us that not only are there miracles in nature but that there are miracles in history, in your history and mine. The purpose of Easter is to convince us that there will be a time in our lives when we too shall be transformed into something utterly magnificent and beautiful. The purpose of Easter is to tell us of those good and glorious promises of God who has the power to take that which is dead and transform it into life." -Sermons from Seattle by Edward F Markquart