Cocoon Time

About a month ago, Coriel found a tiny, pale green/yellow, hairy caterpillar on our front door. Having recently grown some mail-order caterpillars into beautiful painted lady butterflies, we decided to try our hand at this new one. So we gathered leaves from a number of plants around our front door and watched to see which one it ate. Once we figured it out, we gave it a steady diet thereof. And our caterpillar grew. As he molted, he darkened to a brownish black. Finally, one day, as if some inner instinct was triggered, our caterpillar zipped up to the top of the habitat we had him in and started growing his cocoon. (I say it seemed like something was triggered because up until that moment, he had always been slow, ponderous in his movement, and now—pow!—he zoomed.)

The world's worst picture of a fuzzy webby cocoon.

The next day he was happily stuck in his little cocoon spot on the roof of the habitat. I’d never seen a cocoon like this—it looked like essentially just a bunch of thick webbing keeping him stuck there. Kind of ugly and amazing at the same time.

So we waited and watched and hoped that he would hatch. In the meantime, we’d been seeing a lot of butterflies in our yard and garden, large black and yellow swallowtails. I hadn’t looked up what kind of caterpillar produced these beauties, but I secretly hoped that we would get one of those. After all, big black fuzzy body... big black butterfly, right?

On Friday, as usual, I checked on our little habitat—and saw that our cocoon had hatched. But far from producing a big black butterfly, it had produced a half-inch snowy white moth. Its body was furred and looked luxuriously soft and feathery. It was so very far from what I had expected or hoped for.

And I was thrilled.

What an amazing exhibit of nature’s majesty and the miracles produced around me every day! A fuzzy black caterpillar became a snowy white moth (like this dude here). It wasn’t showy and huge, but it was gorgeous.

Letting the moth go.

This week, I have been reading about adversity and the Lord’s counsel to us in adversity. He speaks of the gifts He has planned for us—both joy in our earthly existence and glory hereafter. He tells us that we cannot even begin to comprehend what He has in store. Looking at our pure white moth I got a tiny inkling of what He means. I would never, ever have suspected such a beautiful creation to come out of that cocoon. I expected something marvelous, but what I got was even better than I had imagined.

Did you know that while caterpillars are in that cocoon, they essentially break down into a caterpillar soup? There are a few bits and clusters of cells that don’t break down completely, but for the most part the caterpillar essentially digests itself to grow anew. This does not sound pleasant to me. But then their bodies start to rebuild, forming something far more wonderful.

I think life can be that way, if we permit it. Adversity is our cocoon time. And while the caterpillar is biologically wired to complete this transition successfully, we have to make that decision ourselves. We have to choose to allow God (through adversity) to break down our weaknesses, to rebuild us into something stronger. And when we allow God to do that work, what we get in the end is something pure and clean and strong, something better than we had in mind for ourselves.

More of us letting it go. Fly, moth, fly!

P.S. Raising a caterpillar is an experience that can only be described as epic. If you haven’t done it, you should. It’s fun, not very difficult once you know what it eats, and just plain amazing. Plus, you can totally count it as educational.