Apparently, becoming a butterfly is horrifying.
Nobody tells you this. We get the elementary-school version. Caterpillar. Cocoon. Butterfly. Three adorable pictures connected by arrows. Very Disneylike.
What they leave out is the part where the caterpillar basically turns into soup.
When a caterpillar enters its chrysalis, much of its larval body begins breaking down. Tissues dissolve. Parts of the creature that crawled in stop existing in the form they had before.
Apparently the scientific process for becoming one of the most beautiful creatures on earth begins with turning yourself into something you wouldn’t eat on a dare.
Nobody puts that part on the kindergarten bulletin board. Apparently “turn into soup and see what happens” isn’t much of a classroom theme.
But inside all that biological chaos are structures involving something called imaginal cells. They were there before the chrysalis and the wings. Before there was anything suggesting this thing might someday float around a garden and land delicately on somebody’s shoulder.
They help build what comes next. Which I find fascinating and slightly frightening.
Why couldn't God couldn’t just add the wings?
I couldn’t stop thinking about the mush. Because I’ve been mush.
For most of my adult life, I knew exactly who I was. Certainly in my profession for nearly three decades, education wasn’t simply what I did. It became part of how I understood myself.
I had enough lanyards of the years to restrain a medium-sized horse.
I thought I was a pillar of education and my community.
Well. Not so fast big guy.
Turns out pillars can fall too. And when mine did, I discovered something I wasn’t prepared for.
I didn’t know who I was without it. For years, when someone asked what I did for a living, I didn’t have to think. Eventually, that question became surprisingly complicated.
What do you do?
For a while, I gave answers long enough to make people regret asking. I would explain what I used to do. What had happened. What I was doing now. What I hoped to do next. Basically a small autobiographical documentary while some poor guy at a barbecue was just trying to make conversation near the potato salad.
Sometimes I said I was retired. That didn’t feel right.
Sometimes I said I was an educator. That didn’t feel right either.
The truth was harder. I didn’t know anymore...
The identity I had spent most of my adult life building was gone, and underneath it wasn’t some enlightened new version of myself patiently waiting with a butterfly tattoo and a gratitude journal.
There was just me. And I wasn’t particularly sure who that was.
There were mornings when I’d wake up and, for approximately three seconds, everything felt normal. Then my brain would catch up.
Oh. Right. This is life now.
I wasn’t thinking about transformation. I wasn’t wondering what beautiful new chapter God might be preparing for me. I thought my life had gone to hell and in many ways righfully so...
Things I had spent decades building disappeared. Relationships changed. People changed. I changed. Some people who once knew my name suddenly seemed to have misplaced it.
And I wish I could tell you I handled all of this with tremendous spiritual maturity. I did not.
I wanted answers...hoping for timelines. I wanted God to explain Himself.
Preferably in writing.
Mostly, I wanted my old life back. My old identity, certainty and the guy I understood.
That’s why the mush bothered me. Because there is no moment inside that chrysalis when the caterpillar looks particularly promising. If you didn’t know what was happening, you’d probably assume something had gone terribly wrong.
We tell transformation stories from the other side. We show the butterfly, the graduation, the anniversary, the sobriety chip, the new job. We show the smiling person explaining how everything they went through made them who they are.
Nobody takes pictures of the mush because nobody wants the mush in the Christmas card.
But that’s where a lot of life actually happens. And if you’re there right now, I’m not going to tell you everything is happening for a reason.
I don’t know that. I’m not going to tell you everything will work out exactly the way you want.
I don’t know that either. And I definitely won’t tell you to enjoy the journey.
Sometimes the journey sucks. What I can tell you is that I made a mistake while I was in mine (and still am).
I assumed that because I couldn’t recognize my life anymore, there was nothing left of it. There was.
Slowly, I noticed I was different. I listened more. I prayed more honestly. Pain looked different when I wasn’t observing it from a safe distance anymore.
And then something happened I never would have predicted. I found myself working in addiction recovery and as a pastoral associate.
For most of my life, I stood in front of rooms because I had something to teach. Now I sometimes sit beside someone having one of the worst days of his life and realize my job isn’t to teach him anything.
It’s just not to leave.
Turns out some of the things I once wished had never happened to me are the very things that allow me to sit there differently now.
I still don’t know what to make of that. But somewhere along the way, the life I was desperately trying to get back stopped being the life I wanted.
That surprised me. I certainly haven’t emerged as some magnificent butterfly.
Not even close so let’s not get carried away.
Some mornings I barely have pants. And maybe I’ve finally stopped needing to know what comes next.
I don’t know exactly what I’m becoming. I don’t know what all of this will look like from the other side.
And I don’t know what you’re becoming either.
Maybe you’re reading this while something you thought was permanent is disappearing. Maybe you don’t recognize your career, your marriage, your family, your faith, your future, or yourself.
I can’t promise you wings.
There was a time when I looked at what remained of my life and thought I was looking at complete wreckage. Maybe I was. But I wasn’t only wreckage.
Something was still there but I couldn’t see yet.
And perhaps faith isn’t knowing what comes out of the chrysalis.
Perhaps it’s simply refusing to believe that the mush is the end of the story.
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