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Saturday, February 24, 2007

Mariposa Speaks

I love butterflies and it explains why I call this blogsite as such. If one will ask me what about butterflies that fascinates me, I can come up with a thousand and one answers. But I have one very good reason for loving butterflies. I find their metamorphosis (life cycle) very inspiring.

Below is an old story about a butterfly and a man, something that I learned from my Mom since I was in my grade school. I had a project then, we were asked to culture a caterpillar and observe how it transforms into a lovely butterfly. My impatience can be traced back since the day I was born I guess, that it was during that time that I was observing the caterpillar became a cocoon and the cocoon being abuot to hatched into a butterfly that I offered to help the butterfly being hatched when my Mom stopped me and told me the following story...(I wish I could give credit to its original author).

A man found a cocoon of a butterfly. One day a small opening appeared. He sat and watched the butterfly for several hours as it struggled to force its body through that little hole. Then it seemed to stop making any progress. It appeared as if it had gotten as far as it had and it could go no further.
Then the man decided to help the butterfly, so he took a pair of scissors and snipped off the remaining bit of the cocoon. The butterfly then emerged easily. But it had a swollen body and small, shriveled wings. The man continued to watch the butterfly because he expected that, at any moment, the wings would enlarge and expand to be able to support the body, which would contract in time.

Neither happened! In fact, the butterfly spent the rest of its life crawling around with a swollen body and shriveled wings. It never was able to fly.

What the man in his kindness and haste did not understand was that the restricting cocoon and the struggle required for the butterfly to get through the tiny opening were God's way of forcing fluid from the body of the butterfly into its wings so that it would be ready for flight once it achieved its freedom from the cocoon.

Sometimes struggles are exactly what we need in our life and we have to go through them on our own. If God allowed us to go through our life without any obstacles, it would cripple us. We would not be as strong as what we could have been. And we could never fly.

I know we humans are very protective over our loved ones. We would do anything in our power to spare the people whom we care from pain, but that is not how things are supposed to be. My Mom always tell me to be strong for myself for she cannot transfer her wisdom to me without letting me go through life's journey. It did not made any much sense to me then...but I have come to understand the full meaning of it now.

I thank my Mom for allowing me to commit as much mistakes as I can no matter how much it pains her. I thank my Mom (well also my Dad) for staying with me all throughout. I could just imagine how much faith she has to believe that she had made me ready enough for the world, and to hope that I will be what she hoped me to be.

Now, I no longer hope for anything specific in my career and personal life. But I pray that I will be the person God wants me to be.

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