THE SHRIVELLED BUTTERFLY
(A Traditional Story,
Author unknown)
A man found a cocoon of a butterfly. One
day, a small opening appeared. He sat and watched the butterfly for several
hours as it struggled to force its body through that little hole. Then, it
seemed to stop making any progress. It appeared as if it had gotten as far as
it could and it could go no further. So the man decided to help the butterfly.
He took a pair of scissors and snipped off the remaining bit of the cocoon.
The butterfly then emerged easily, but it had a swollen body and small, shriveled wings.The man continued to watch the butterfly because he expected that, at any moment, the wings would enlarge and expand to be able to support the body, which would contract in time. Neither happened! In fact, the butterfly spent the rest of its life crawling around with a swollen body and shriveled wings. It never was able to fly.
What the man, in his kindness and 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 from the cocoon.
Sometimes struggles are exactly what we need in our lives too. If God allowed
us to go through our lives without any obstacles, we would not be as strong as
what we could have been.
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