Remarkable transformation
My mother watched with excitement as the chrysalis transformed into a magnificent butterfly in her kitchen.
The monarch butterfly’s amazing migration will return it to the same tree where it all began.
The book Everything I Know I Learned in Kindergarten was on to something. I know about this because my mother was a kindergarten teacher. Year after year I watched as she prepped her classroom and planned her lessons. One of the most fascinating things she’d teach those 5-year-olds was about the remarkable transformation of the monarch butterfly. She’d order the kit with the live chrysalis that would arrived in the mail and she’d put it in a glass container in her classroom. As she taught about the metamorphosis process, the children would look through the glass at the still chrysalis attached to the twig and imagine all that was taking place inside that cocoon as it readied itself for its next stage of life. In just 10 to 14 days the body of the caterpillar would radically transform itself and emerge as a glorious monarch butterfly.
How does this happen? Scientists have called it “butterfly magic.” As I read on the internet about butterfly facts (and there are plenty of them) I was amazed at the migration of the monarch and God’s perfect plan and his perfect timing shown to us over and over again in nature:
“The monarch butterfly is the worlds only migrating insect. It can migrate as far as 3,000 miles from Nova Scotia, Canada to a preordained destination in Michoacán, Mexico. It navigates with remarkable precision to a destination that it has never been to before. This migration may take three or four generations of butterflies with each generation picking up where the last generation left off until the migration cycle is complete. The monarch will even migrate to the exact tree that its forefathers used. Then, it returns to its original starting point and the process starts again. Obviously, monarch butterflies are programmed by the all-knowing Creator to accomplish their amazing migration cycle.”
A month ago, my 81-year-old mom called with excitement to tell me she had discovered a chrysalis hanging from a tree branch in her backyard. She clipped off the twig and brought it into her house and put it in a glass jar to watch God’s sovereignty again at work. And with the same excitement I had known when I first heard her tell me the story of her classroom days, I marveled at the joy heard again in her voice.
Thank you, Mom, for your love of education and for showing me year after year, God’s love through your life – through struggles, hopes, dreams… and butterflies.
It’s not magic, it’s all part of the plan.
Psalm 78:3-7 tells us that we are to declare “things that we have heard and known, that our fathers have told us”… we are to “tell to the coming generation the glorious deeds of the Lord,… that the next generation might know them, the children yet unborn, who should arise and tell them to their children”