Change is not comfortable. Change is not a place people naturally seek. The status quo is much more to people’s liking and is encouraged by others. Does the caterpillar think about the day that it gravitates toward some unknown and possibly scary period where it decides and indeed can’t help itself to wrap silken thread around it’s body allowing less and less light in the blanket of what will be it’s home for a while? Does it comprehend that things will change and climbing about on limbs and leaves will no longer be allowed as it was before? Everything it used to know as truth will be different when it comes out of that womb of silk. What about the changes inside that womb? Have you ever thought about what happens inside for that time when there is no light no sound and no outside world to reference things to?
I believe I was fortunate to grow up in a family that virtually instilled no particular religious beliefs. That doesn’t stop a person from believing in something for there was many a night that I stared out at the night sky and poured out my heart to the moon stars and blackness that I saw from a bedroom window. Even though there was no religious education to speak of, I was indoctrinated to believe certain things. Oh, not like a school at home that your parents taught in that fashion but children learn what they are shown even if never explained why things are that way.
There is a story about a woman with a family and it is a holiday. She wants to cook a ham for a family meal and the daughter notices that her mother takes the ham cuts off a good portion of the end and throws it away. The daughter asks why she did that and the mother tells her that’s the way it’s done to cook ham. “Why?” the daughter asks. My mother did it this way and she showed me. “Well who showed her?” I guess her mother did. “Mom, you threw away a lot of meat. That doesn’t make sense.” The mother asks her mother and she says that was the way she was taught by her mom and back it goes to the Great Grand mother who happens to be alive and she is called and consulted about the cooking of the ham. The great grandmother says “Oh! I didn’t have a pan big enough for the whole thing so I used to cut the end off so it would fit.” The status quo is easier to maintain than changing or even asking a “Why?” every now and then.
In this rapidly changing world there are many things you and your family must change in order to get along, get by or just plain survive. None of this comes easy nor do we do it without some whining, stomping of our feet or bucking the system for a time until we capitulate and fall in line with the rest of society. In United States there were those that said “no more”. A ruler was changed. The way the nation was run changed. The way the people had to respond changed. Many were hurt, jostled, left out, or perished due to this change. No one escapes, no one is untouched.
There are many times a Chrysalis will be formed in your life and you are forced to change. Leaving school, getting married, having children, divorce, work changes, moving, loved ones being sick and dying, your own health could take a turn for the worse can all make change inevitable and unpleasant at the very least. What is changing in your life now? Are your beliefs about the world being challenged? Are your beliefs about your Faith being trampled? Are your perceptions of yourself morphing into some thing unrecognizable to the “old” you? Are your relationships turning into dust when they were once rock solid?
There is a hope in all this. For things to grow and thrive change has to happen. Since this is a given in life there are provisions for such challenges. A caterpillar only stays in the chrysalis for so long then it emerges into a different being. The process of changing is painful and seemingly drawn out. In the darkness of the chrysalis, time stands still and it seems never ending. But it does, at least until the next wave of changes flow. One day you are crawling from place to place and the next you are able to fly.