We are living in a world of change. What we can be most
certain of is change. And change is
occurring faster and faster each day.
Our lives are being transformed with the changes in our world even
though we may not be aware of it. The
most important question is what are we changing into – are we becoming more
dehumanised and changed into human doings or are we becoming human beings who
are new creations reflecting the love of God?
In God's creation, we see pictures of the wonder of
transformation in the tadpole and the caterpillar. From living in the water,
the tadpole is transformed into a frog that lives on land. The caterpillar, on
the other hand, undergoes the remarkable transformation from a caterpillar
crawling on the ground to a butterfly flitting from flower to flower in the
air.
The good news of the gospel is that Jesus Christ came into
the world so that we can become new creations – we are to live in this physical
world as spiritual beings. The tadpole
and caterpillar can help us understand the kinds of transformation that we are
going through.
The tadpole changes into a frog by gradually growing limbs
and losing its tail. At the same time it develops lungs to enable it to breathe
on land and loses the gills that it uses to breathe in the water. The caterpillar, on the other hand, begins
its metamorphosis into a butterfly by losing its legs. It goes through the
process of becoming a cocoon that looks like death for the caterpillar. But the
cocoon is the beginning of the new life for the butterfly.
The metamorphosis of the tadpole into a frog depicts our
pursuit of knowledge to accumulate more and more so that we become human
doings. As we do so, we lose our passion for the beauty of God’s creation in
our physical world. We seek to dominate nature instead of being stewards of the
beautiful and wonderful world that God has created.
The transformation of the caterpillar into a butterfly, on
the other hand, gives us a beautiful picture of the miraculous change of being
born again through the power of the Holy Spirit. It is a process of dying to
our old ways so that God can transform us by reforming and purifying our past
so that we can live as spiritual human beings in a physical world. When we
change and understand that death is not the end but the beginning of a new
life, we will begin to see our sufferings and problems from a new perspective.
Suffering and problems become God’s refining fire to purify
the gold of love that is in our hearts. When our eyes are filled with tears, we
can only see the fire but not our Master’s hand and so our hearts are filled
with fears. But our Master is carefully
watching for the purified gold in our hearts to reflect the faithful and
everlasting love that His beloved Son died on the cross to show us.
Francis Collins, a brilliant scientist who headed the Human
Genome Project, a study of DNA which is the code of life, addressed the paradox
of why our life is more a vale of tears than a garden of delight. He concurred with C.S. Lewis that part of the
problem is our desire to see God as a grandfather in heaven – “a senile
benevolence who like to see young people enjoying themselves.” But Jesus came
to show us that God is our loving Abba Father who loves us too much to leave us
as we are. The challenges, frustrations and suffering in our lives is “God’s
megaphone to rouse a dead world.” They
are to keep us from being “shallow, self-centred creatures who would ultimately
lose all sense of nobility or striving for the betterment of others.”
Sharing from his personal experience of his daughter who was
raped while she was a medical student, he realised that we will never fully
understand the reasons for our painful experiences. However, he began to dimly
see that his daughter’s rape was a challenge to him to try and learn the real
meaning of forgiveness in such terribly heart wrenching circumstances. His daughter also saw her experience as one
that gave her the opportunity and motivation to counsel and comfort others who
have been sexually assaulted.
There will therefore be times when we may feel that God is
not answering our prayers. Nothing seems to be happening in our lives and we
feel spiritually dead like we are in a cocoon. At such times we need to pray
for patience as we wait for the right time to break out of cocoon so that our
spiritual wings will be properly formed and strong.
We can bring our tears and fears to the Cross of Christ so
that so that He can turn them into the strong and beautiful wings for us to fly
above our vale of suffering. The ways of the world will turn us into frogs but
God’s ways will change us into butterflies to pollinate the world so that it
will be a garden of God’s love. Let us
become butterflies and not frogs.
