The New Life that Can Make All of us Soar

So these kids of mine bring me a caterpillar in a jar, munching fall leaves, fat and striped.  He is munching, perched on a thin stick they have placed in the jar. 

“Oh, look at that!”  the little ones exclaim.

“Can we keep him, Mom?”

“No, he has to go back outside so he can get ready for winter.  Caterpillars have to eat lots of leaves and get ready for their transformation into a butterfly.”

“You mean he is going to become a butterfly?”

“Yes, he will spin a cocoon and sleep all winter and in the spring he will hatch out as something completely new, a butterfly.”

“Can’t we keep him just one day in the jar, so we can watch him?”

“I guess but in the morning you have to let him go.”

But by morning, he had spun himself into that dark cocoon hung by a silver thread to the dark wood.  He was already hidden and waiting for his change, his new life to begin.

The girls had first found the caterpillar in my neighbor’s yard.  My neighbor Ammie, the one who tragically lost her teenage son, her only son, in the accident that had almost taken her life as well.  For nine years she has lived with this loss, the loss of her only son.  The loss of her career, because when the carbon monoxide filled their house that night near Christmas, she went too long without air, too long, and it did damage to her organs and brain. She could no longer work and her days were empty and long. The loss of the only life she knew.   She had been a single mom, but after the accident, she was just single.  And the loneliness was a pain you could feel.

 When she moved next door, a year and a half ago, she came over to meet me, her new neighbor, and told us she had moved here to start a new life.  She needed to leave that house where her son had died and find a new place to call home, a place of new beginnings. 
It was a rocky start here.  For one, she and her new little son had never been around a lot of kids, and well, she moved next to me with my passel of six and the myriads of roving bands of children that constantly fill our yard.  This was a shock.  She wasn’t sure she liked us.  In fact she told me she didn’t.  So we started to pray. 

She had told me enough of her story for me to understand that her pain colored her world a shade I had never seen with my eyes.  I knew that the only thing that heals this kind of pain is the balm of God’s love.  So my six kids and I, we prayed.  Every day.  For a year and a half.  We asked Jesus to show us how to love this person who didn’t really like us and misunderstood us.  He wasn’t long with the answers.  Just love.  Just be there. Spend time, become friends, bring soup, make cookies, have campfires, be available, be love.

But the opportunities became daily as she spent almost an entire year confined to the couch because of a doctor misprescribing medication.  We started taking her six year old son to AWANA with us and church on Sunday.  He spent part of just about every day with us because she was struggling just to make it through each day.  We just kept praying for God to do a miracle in her life. 

Finally, after a year, they straightened out her medication and she was able to function again.  She started coming to our small group, this band of people who had spent the last year and a half praying fervently for her, and there she found love.  She wasn’t sure she would, her with the tattoos and the broken family and the life chock full of tragedy. She wondered if we would love her, really, but we did.  She started to see that we were no different than her.  We were just broken people, sinful people, people who knew they needed a Healer and had come to Jesus for the grace and forgiveness He offers.

And when the opportunity came for the Women’s Encounter weekend, I asked her to come spend a weekend away with me, hearing more about God.  She said yes, and there, she had an encounter with Jesus.  She came face to face with this God who loves her, who always has, and she heard about grace in a way that made sense of all this pain.  And she heard that God loves her just as she is.  She can’t be good enough to earn grace, she can’t try harder, she just has to open her hand and receive the forgiveness Jesus bought for her on the cross. That He died to pay the price of her sin and rose again conquering death for us forever. And if we believe in Him, put our trust in Him for eternal life, then we will be forgiven and have life forever.  And she finally did, and grace became her very life.

 And after nine years of struggling under the weight of guilt, feeling to blame for her son’s death, because she was his momma and shouldn’t she have known the furnace was faulty, she thought?  After nine years of suffering a blame that wasn’t hers, she laid it down at the foot of the cross and received the grace to let go of the blame, the pain, the weight, and she was finally free. Now, her joy is contagious and she can’t help telling everyone she knows about what God has done for her.  About how God gave her this crazy peace, this deep down joy, this unbelievable freedom from all the things that held her.

And how do you describe this new life that is ours in Christ?  It is nothing short of transformation.  We all watched as Ammie came out of her dark cocoon of pain and waiting, into this brilliant light of new life in Christ.  We watched as she fought free of the confines of that darkness that had held her for so long.  And we watched as her wings unfurled and she took flight, soaring into all that glorious light.

 

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!

2 Corinthians 5:17