Metamorphosis ~ Spiritual Growth through Struggle

It was a late afternoon in the parasitology lab.  i was tired and just wanted to go home.  We had been there for hours, in a cramped lab that smelled like body odor and swamp.  Counting tiny amphipods by a meager red light was bad enough in and of itself without the fact that we weren't getting the data we'd hoped for.  My supervisor, Charles, fished something out of one of the tanks.  "Check it out!" he said, holding it up.  A dragonfly nymph had climbed up on one of the exposed twigs.  She was slowly changing shape.  Her head flattened out, her eyes changed as my own watched unblinkingly.  Her thorax thickened, and her abdomen thinned.  Slowly, four pencil tips emerged from her back.  The wings grew out, turning from cobalt to glass.  Slowly, colors appeared.  it was magic.  What did it feel like, having dry skin for the first time?  What was it like to see the world through a thousand facets?  

i don't like it when people ask me what i am.  What am i?  What am i supposed to say?  i'm a woman.  i'm American.  i'm sometimes a scientist and sometimes an adventurer.  A wise man once asked me, “What are you becoming?”  The sun was pouring in through glass windows at the RZIM headquarters in Atlanta.  His face was like leather, not worn and tired, but the leather of something familiar. I’d only known the man for 2 days at this point, but I trusted his words; like a good belt they cinched me together when I should have been falling apart.  He said, “We make our choices, and then our choices make us.”[1]  

 We are metamorphosing continuously: daily experiencing new sensations, new emotions, new discoveries and ideas.  He spoke to my heart as he described the butterfly emerging from a chrysalis.  If you were to cut away that chrysalis, he mused, the creature’s wings will never be strong enough to fly.  We can remove the struggle from her in an effort to save her, but in the end it will be her demise.  The metamorphosis is completed in the struggle—THAT’S where the muscles take form. 

One of my favorite authors, writing in the 1st century AD, composed a letter to a persecuted group of people in Rome.  In the letter he encouraged them with these words: “We rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.”[2]

According to this author, the struggle makes us stronger.  In strength we metamorphose into who we are meant to be, and that gives us hope for the future.  We can only hope for the future if our future is sure, otherwise the hope is futile. 

The dragonfly nymph is drawn out from the water by forces she does not understand.  She stands in the dark, in the cold dry air, surrounded by strange sounds.  She is alone there, in that alien world high above her home.  Discomfort pulsates through her as the respiratory system changes.  Now she is filling up with air, the water is dripping away.  Her eyes change.  The world looks brighter now.  Pain sears through her thorax and abdomen.  Something bulges up beneath her shoulders.  Wings burst forth.  Why wings?  What are they for?  Why these streaks of color appearing?  Why does she need iridescent melanocytes glittering on her body?  Hope is the translation of the future into the present age.  Hope teaches us to fly, to step out into unknown worlds.




[1] Tom Tarrants.  Read his story here: http://www.sarges.com/NLS/Bios/TomTarrants.html
[2] Romans 5v3-5 English Standard Version

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