Change is scary.

My daughter ran across the street a couple weeks ago to join the neighbor girls in hosting a lemonade stand, racing back home with loads of smiles and a few dollars in her pocket. A cup of caterpillars was immediately dispatched to our address.

We’ve watched these wiggly little critters eat their very hungry way to magic; and here they are, ready for transformation. I must say, I’m moved.

Did you know that after caterpillars retreat into a chrysalis by molting inside their skin, that the next step is to digest their own bodies? It’s true! Inside that pod of change, they release enzymes which turn their bodies into caterpillar soup! That is, everything except their imaginal disc cells, which by grand design hold God’s instructions for adult butterfly body parts. Those imaginal discs then begin to quickly multiply and grow, using the soup as fuel for their marvelous transformation.

I’ve thought quite a lot this week, as we’ve observed our 5 little guys’ journeys to the top of the cup, about what it must be like for the caterpillars to do this. Dying to self and leaving behind everything they know - including every physical thing they’ve ever been and all they’ve known or imagined - they allow God to completely rewrite their life story. And he does it. In a raw and magnificent way that only God could do.

Yes, it hurts. Heck, virtually every old part of the caterpillar is destroyed.

Yep, it’s terrifying. All that once was is no more, and what’s to come is still a vast mystery.

And yet, God has a plan. A remarkable, beautiful plan.

And so, they do it. Trusting the One who created them for this very reimagining, who holds their faithful and shaky selves in the palm of his brilliant and loving hand, they surrender to the remaking.

We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty. -Maya Angelou

Are you grieving? Leaving something you’ve always known behind and afraid of what’s next? I am. Maybe you’re still wriggling around in the muck of pain and confusion. Been there.

Change is hard. And scary. But God is good.

Don’t forget: Love is at work. Beauty and goodness have been written on the wings of the dawn.

And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose. Romans 8:28