Urban Butterfly

A little over a week ago my foraging 6 and 3 year old discovered some caterpillars eating milk weed on a grassy median between the parking lot across from our building and the street.  Every day they begged me to go back and check on them. 

Each day we saw them munching away on the leafy plants.  About five days ago we discovered one of them hanging in this cocoon:

We have a mesh “butterfly garden” that I purchased a few years ago so that we could watch the caterpillars you can order from a bug catalog go through their life cycle.  We decided to transfer the cocoon into our little mesh cage and watch it hatch out.  Yesterday after realizing that three of the caterpillars had probably been eaten, we rescued the last remaining one and transferred it along with some milkweed into our makeshift butterfly zoo. 

This morning J. watched it expectantly and was fortunate enough to see the first butterfly emerge in it’s new state.  A monarch butterfly!

We decided to take it out back to our building’s garden and release it.  As we watched it hesitantly crawl around on our hands and finally flap it’s little wings and take off, I was just taken by how amazing the life cycle of a butterfly really is.  I mean a bright black and yellow wiggly worm wraps itself up in a tight little suitcase hanging upside down, and a few days later an insect looking nothing like it’s former self emerges, with beautiful colored wings and a body that looks nothing like it once did.  That’s just incredible! 

I’m literally in awe that God does things like that in nature.  Things that just defy logic and understanding.  Better, I love how the caterpillar to butterfly transformation mirrors what God is able to do with our own lives when we realize we need Him to.  A similar process, with the same beautiful result: a transformed life!

“Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!  “ 2Corinthians 5:17