Butterfly Dreams

You found it in your garden in the early spring, and have been keeping it in your mom’s old Mason jar. You have prepared the perfect, comfortable habitat for your new caterpillar friend. He has fresh green leaves and a droplet of water every day. You have carefully designed the perfect jungle gym of twigs on which he can exercise. Every day you watch him inch his way up and down the twigs gorging himself silly, until one day he hides himself away in a mesmerizing chrysalis. For about two weeks you anxiously wait for him to reappear, and when he does you are thrilled at his transformation. He is now a beautiful butterfly! As he gracefully tests his new wings, you are sobered by a growing realization. You need to let him go. Ceremoniously, you take your jar outside, unscrew the lid, and wait. As fresh air fills his home and at last dries his wings, he ventures to the lip, gives a little flutter as if to say, “thank you”, and flitters away to find a new home.  

Dreams are like butterflies, we nurture them, imagine how they will develop, but in the end we must let them go. The perfect job, prestigious scholarship, special friend, advantageous lifestyle we set free just like a delicate butterfly. They flit away from view leaving us with a small ache of “what could have been”. As you deliberated releasing your butterfly, your final decision was made in love- love for its life, for what it could be, and for the purpose greater than your enjoyment that it would serve.

Love = Sacrifice

There will be moments in our lives when God tests our love for Him and others by requesting that we release our dreams. How often has God reached down, gently touched my “fistful of dreams”, and asked, “Would you let this one go for me?” Deciding to follow Jesus is a decision of love, and the greatest test of love is often sacrifice. True sacrifices are costly. They require giving up something that you hold dear. When we decided to follow Jesus was it only until he asks too much of us? Will we turn back and say, “No, this is too costly.”  In my life, I have discovered that truly loving Jesus is giving up what I desire for him. Sacrificing my sleep to do a favor for a fellow believer in Christ, my energy and youth to serve and teach others, my desires to allow another to have something better, and my dreams to be a part of something bigger than myself. These have been tests of my love, a love that is greater than my love for myself. Yet even though these sacrifices bring a twinge of pain or disappointment, I remember the definition of true love, and the constant character of my Heavenly Father.

Love is giving, not taking

1 Corinthians 13:1-5 Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing. Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, Doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil

Jesus himself demonstrated an incomprehensible love far above what we could offer in return. Yet He, through His Father, continues to give.

God loves me more.

Matthew 7 says that He will give good things. “If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good things to them that ask him?”

Philippian 4:19 promises that all our needs will be met. “But my God shall supply all your need according to his riches in glory by Christ Jesus.”

Psalms 37 also promises that He knows us and will give us our hearts true desire as he molds that desire.

God is bigger than my dreams.

Jeremiah 29:11 perhaps holds one of the most beautiful promises of all, “For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, saith the Lord, thoughts of peace, and not of evil, to give you an expected end.”  It is by this Hebrews 11 faith, that we can let go of that cherished dream and say with peace, “It will be well.” We can release our big dreams to an even bigger God.