The Job Caterpillar

My mom always use to quote the “patience of Job” phrase and as I became older and read the book of Job or heard Job more often in sermons I adduced that more could have been additional verbiage, for instance: “the remarkably tolerant, insurmountable, faithful, ever enduring, and didn’t really throw a crazy tantrum like most people would have, patient Job.”

Last weekend we visited TTUfor NatureFest. My daughter’s favorite attraction: the touch, hold, and getting smothered by snakes exhibit, which equates more accurately  by her mother, myself, not a snake lover unless it’s a boot design, to mean: cringe, shriek, jerk, and almost hurl exhibit as the snakes climb all over my daughter’s smiling happily head.

One of my favorites:  the exhibit that taught me a reminder about Job and of course, God. It’s always so nice to learn when you visit an exhibit. Okay, okay . . . I learned some clemency for snakes, but let’s talk about the Artic Wooly Bear caterpillar. In the film exhibit, this cute little caterpillar eats away on a desolate amount of flowers (maybe three total out of 4000 square miles) that managed to bloom in the balmy spring/summer on the frozen tundra.  That season lasts about 2 second give or take . . . Wooly bear dude has to eat enough to cocoon himself and metamorphasize into the moth he is to become. However, if he doesn’t eat enough then he has to find a tiny precipice, lay there all curled up, and freeze to death literally. Then many months later he thaws out and magnanimously kicks starts himself to eat again. He is racing against time and natural events to achieve his goal. If he doesn’t turn into a moth, he can’t mate, fly or anything, just eat and get freeze-dried. This caterpillar goes through this process for 7 years before he gets to have enough food in his tiny furry body to change into a moth.

I got frustrated and tired for him just watching the documentary! I would have given up by year three even if I had been able to eat guilt-free chocolate and lobster spaghetti cooked by Gordon Ramsey, himself!
I still would have exasperated such a short cycle of actual living that I wouldn’t own the patience and determination to make it to the metamorphosis. Not only that, the little thing would jump up when he woke up, leaping bounds of a positive attitude when he awoke, as if he had the utmost confidence each time!  Baffling!?!  There was no slacking, no attitude, no whining or at least none that I could see or  hear in the film and I’d like to think it wasn’t edited out for clandestine purposes.

Many times in our lives, we have goals that we are working towards and it feels categorically impossible. We tire of the melancholic monotony whether it be looking for that special person to marry, or if you are trying to have a baby, or trying to get a book published, or trying to pass an exam.  So many experiences will seem like this caterpillar’s life journey; perseverance, patience, and God should remain.

God is the full answer to survive to the rewarding end. God is there. He knows you are trying, struggling, learning, building character, screaming, biting your nails, and running out of steam and he is helping you whether you sense it or not.

If a bellicose wooly bear caterpillar with a tiny yet promulgate heart and even smaller brain can do it instinctively, then I’m pretty sure the rest of us Homo sapiens can too. “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.”NKJV Philippians 4:13.

Not – I can do some of the easy stuff, I can coast through and pass the bar exam without studying, I can win American Idol without warming up, I can kick this depression while still dwelling on negative thoughts, I can be an honest politician among the others who abscond and make money from selling uranium, magisterially for a recent example – Nope. Today, even more so than ever as a Christian you will have to push like a bulldozer through a mountain of banal trash, clearing your own path of righteousness leading you meticulously towards your goal within God’s will for your life.

[avantlink_ad merchant=”NOTW” title=”NOTW – 234×60″][/avantlink_ad]I’m so happy to know God’s love is so constant,  and  infinitely more enduring than anything known and unknown to man. You should be happy about that too! Find your joy through your struggle. Use that to lift your step, strengthen your stride and like the Artic caterpillar – eat those few pitiful spring flowers to fatten your belly. God wants all of us – his children to sprout our own wings and fly.