Brainstorming~
A misnomer, perhaps,
For something less like storming a castle,
More like splashing in a puddle,
Finding pictures in the clouds,
Wandering through an unfamiliar garden,
As surprised as anyone
At what lies around the next bend.
North Texas is not currently in a season of drought, so Amore and I were able to enjoy the full delights of an arboretum full of water features and the joy they bring to the ears as well as the eyes. We gazed out over White Rock Lake to the skyline and a mansion that made me think of Tara. These photos won't do the beauty justice, I know, but I pray they refresh and encourage your soul today.
Most importantly, may they draw your heart towards Jesus, who alone gives us living water and satisfies our thirsty souls. Everything else is a leaky cistern compared with Him. He can refresh our spirits even when our bodies are weary and hurting and our hearts are aching. He can revive our hearts to follow Him fully for one more day. Come to Him and drink freely of His grace and life, dear Crumbles.
The Samaritan woman said to him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask for a drink from me, a woman of Samaria?” (For Jews have no dealings with Samaritans.) Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.” The woman said to him, “Sir, you have nothing to draw water with, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? Are you greater than our father Jacob? He gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did his sons and his livestock.” Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I will not be thirsty or have to come here to draw water" (John 4:9-25).
On the last day of the feast, the great day, Jesus stood up and cried out, “If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, ‘Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.’” Now this he said about the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were to receive, for as yet the Spirit had not been given, because Jesus was not yet glorified (John 7:37-39).
As delightful as all these fountains and streams were, how much more blessed will the river of the water of life in the eternal kingdom of God be:
Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city; also, on either side of the river, the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit each month. The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. No longer will there be anything accursed, but the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his servants will worship him.
The Spirit and the Bride say, “Come.” And let the one who hears say, “Come.” And let the one who is thirsty come; let the one who desires take the water of life without price (Revelation 22:1-3, 17).
May the Good Shepherd lead you beside waters of rest, beloved. May He restore your soul. May He lead you in paths of righteousness for His name's sake (Psalm 23:2-3). Amen.
Words fascinate me in general, but the collective nouns for birds have a particular appeal.
A scold of jays? Yes.
A raft of ducks? Apropos.
A host of sparrows? If our feeders are typical, absolutely.
A drumming of woodpeckers? No joke.
A charm of finches? Indeed.
House finches live year all year, but we only see goldfinches in the winter. They are here en masse right now, and I am loving every minute of it. This morning I counted 10 coming for breakfast at the same time. (They are quite petite, much smaller than house finches or sparrows, but larger than the hummingbirds we see here.) May the following peeks into our backyard brighten your day.
"Remember, O my soul,
It is thy duty and privilege to rejoice in God:
He requires it of thee for all his favours of grace.
Rejoice then in the giver and his goodness,
Be happy in him, O my heart, and in nothing but God,
for whatever a man trusts in,
from that he expects happiness.
"He who is the ground of thy faith
should be the substance of thy joy.
Whence then come heaviness and dejection,
when joy is sown in thee,
promised by the Father,
bestowed by the Son,
inwrought by the Holy Spirit,
thine by grace,
thy birthright in believing?
"...Let God be all in all to thee,
and joy in the fountain that is always full."
This post was scheduled more than a week ago. I had no way of knowing then that on the publication date we would be counting the final days of a family member's cancer battle. I considered rescheduling the post for some later date; however, these words are still just as true, though incongruous with today's emotions. Only joy in and from God never disappoints. When He is our trust, He can give joy even in the midst of sorrow and grief. Thank you, kind crumbles, for lifting Amore's family in prayer this week. It's been quite a hard year. To quote C. S. Lewis, "We are not necessarily doubting that God will do the best for us; we are wondering how painful the best will turn out to be" (Letters to an American Lady).
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.
