butterfly

There's a song which begins - "If I were a butterfly...".

Not the world's greatest song, I have to say, though it makes a certain point, I suppose.

I was thinking about the song today, or at least that opening line.

I was thinking that if I were a butterfly I'd not be too unduly worried by my caterpillar skin. I'd figure that if my skin just withered away and finally dropped right off, there'd still be me and at last I'd be really free.

Sometimes it feels a bit like that. As if wee church here is a beautiful, dancing butterfly still trapped in the cumbersome big church caterpillar skin.

If you are a butterfly you really don't need to be worried too much about your caterpillar skin.

The slowly moving caterpillar 'ship of state' is not itself the finished thing. It hides within its awkward, ugly, squeeze-box-like compartments as it moves along, an altogether different form of life which one day will be free to show its gentle, floating beauty to the world.

Wee church is that butterfly. Still growing, deep within the outward caterpillar skin.

If I were a butterfly I think I could live with that. At least meanwhile.

The caterpillar skin of the big church institution is starting to wither and die, I suspect.

The day when the butterflies fly away free are nearer than we maybe think.

There were glimpses of that again today.

A girl coming in, from virtually off the street. Wanting her children baptised. Wanting to give them a sense that they somehow belonged.

Since it wasn't a thing that she had known herself. She's not baptised. She's starting from scratch.

She wants, I suspect, to be free. Like the butterflies are free (to quote Charles Dickens).

She's looking for life.

There were others I saw later on, at night. They, too, have been looking for life.

And have found it, in meeting with Christ.

But they've still got their problems, things that they need to work through and get straight in their minds.

Issues to do with the Bible, and how we're to read and interpret the thing.

The time was well spent and we covered a good lot of ground. I think things were clearer by far by the time we were done.

Tucked away inside our wee church life God's butterfly is growing. Like some top-secret project that's being followed through beneath the clever camouflage of something very different.

I think that's a part of the tension I often feel. The caterpillar skin of big church life seems just whole worlds away from what's being slowly nurtured here by God.

The butterfly is his masterpiece. Not the caterpillar skin.