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Sunday, January 16, 2011

An Eternal Butterfly

Shortly after my husband passed away I started to feel like I was losing control of everything in my life.  During one of my very hard days, I was given this image of a butterfly.  The image brought with it the idea that through my trials I was being turned into an Eternal Butterfly.  I embraced this image, as you can see from the title of my blog, and have used it as a sort of life line.

Over the past year, the idea that came with the image of the Eternal Butterfly, has evolved.  I have come to realize that my Heavenly Father is not himself turning me into the butterfly, he is only providing me with the tools I need in order to change myself into the butterfly.  It was a foreign concept to me and I am only just beginning to realize how I am supposed to start going about it.

Throughout my life, I have always been told that it isn't what is on the outside that matters, it is what is on the inside that counts.  While I am still a firm believer that this is true, I am beginning to understand that both the inside and the outside have a direct impact on each other.  The people who are most successful in life are the ones who are able to merge the two and become one.  The process is very much like the creation of a butterfly.  You first have the caterpillar (the inside) and the cocoon (the outside).  When the circumstances are just right, these two things together create the butterfly.

I have begun to realize that I have focused the majority of my life's efforts on the caterpillar and not much on the cocoon.  The caterpillar is getting extremely anxious and is ready to go, but the cocoon is much too weak to turn the caterpillar into a butterfly.  So, for the next little while I will be focusing much more attention on the cocoon.  Some of the things I do for the cocoon may seem fairly silly to people on the outside (like starting to wear makeup which I have never been really that much into), but if those things make the caterpillar happy, then who am I to deny it one of those simple little pleasures?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Go for it honey!

I am a bit the same .... only cursory attempts to look "nice" in the past few years, as I knew I was always young and beautiful in G's eyes.
Now ... I put in a bit of effort and I have to say that I feel better for it.