What I Write About

I write about the infinite number of intersections between every day life and the good news of the God who has come to get us.

Tuesday, August 22, 2006

The Butterfly Effect

Yesterday during our day-long Coordinating Team retreat with the core six student leaders we took a chunk of time in the morning to be with the Lord. I usually enjoy the prospect of extended time to be with God, but yesterday I was anxious.

This busy time of year almost always brings up deeper stuff inside of me. Some years I'm just too busy to deal with it--"not now God." Other years, I pry myself away from trying to make everything happen exactly how I want it to and take a deeper look at what's going on in my soul and what God might want to do in me instead of trying to control what God might want to do around me.

This year, by God's grace and his incessant prompting, I've been digging around to deeper places in my soul than I think I've ever been before. And what's happened is what we often fear might happen--the questions and the loose screws and the issues run deep and at times are overwhelming.

And so yesterday as I was with the Lord, the questions and issues did seem to be overwhelming. My life on the outside--all the activities on campus over the weekend and a full calendar over the next couple weeks--was hyper-active. And my internal life was churning as well, asking deep questions of significance and motivation.

In the midst of this I paused and looked around--we were at a quiet house set back in the woods in Hillsborough, and I was sitting by a small pond. God often uses things in nature to teach me lessons or to speak to me, so I had prayed at the outset that I would be open to anything he would say to me out there.

A butterfly was flapping around. I don't want to offend anyone, but butterflies really aren't all that graceful. They're flight is jerky, and this one in particular seemed to be frenetic and moving in every which direction, almost unable to really direct it's motions.

As I looked at it, I began to wonder how in the world this flimsy little butterfly with all it's jerky and crazy and frantic motions going this way and that could ever manage to land on a flower. How does a butterfly get to where it was designed to go?

And then I realized: by slowing it's wings, of course.

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