I'm learning the importance of intent. Too much living takes place unintentionally, and it's usually where we humans get ourselves in trouble. When I taught YSA Institute a couple of years ago, the first semester's curriculum was entitled "The Gospel and the Productive Life". That's when the notion of living with intent first started to percolate. When I saw the lesson topics - ranging from paying tithing and living debt free to physical fitness and good health - it struck me how easy it is to slide into a path of least resistance, in almost every aspect of our daily living. It became the connecting thread of the lessons for that semester in an attempt to paint a picture for the students: living the gospel of Jesus Christ transforms a schlepping, scrubby Natural Man who is generally acted upon, into a true Saint - an agent who chooses to act, rather than wait to be acted upon - a Child of God who, because of conscious, intentional actions....IS, who steadily, daily practices and imitates developing the attributes of his Creator...the great I AM.
THAT...is some pretty high living. No wonder it inspires so many of us to.....nap.
But yesterday, I came across a quote I had put in the front of my planner about 10 years ago. It had great meaning for some major life changes and shifted a lot of negative energy to positive energy at the time. It's from a sweet little book called Hope for the Flowers, by Trina Paulus:
"How does one become a butterfly? You must want to be able to fly so much, that you are willing to give up being a caterpillar."
That really explains symbolically the purpose of this life: we were born as the children of the Creator, and must go through a metamorphic process to go back to Him. We work, and practice, and fail, and start over...and make progress, and backslide, and try again, and start over...and strive, and succeed, and fall again, and start over...and over...and over...and over...as we struggle to break free of the chrysalis that binds us. It's easy, from the perspective of inside the chrysalis, to forget that the chrysalis is not all that there is to life. There's soooo much more. There. Is. FLYING.
Being a butterfly is soooo much better than being a caterpillar, but it's easy to forget that the chrysalis, which feels so restrictive and binds us down, is the very thing that facilitates the change. The work and intentional energy required to break free of it is the very process that makes the transformation from caterpillar to butterfly possible.
As you may or may not know, I am not Chinese. Nevertheless, I am dubbing 2014 The Year of the Butterfly. When my little scrubby self wants to keep crawling along its usual path of least resistance, the reminding, nagging, coaching, encouraging question must override:
Would you rather crawl....or fly?
