Is there more to us than the eye sees or the mind perceives? Hard to believe when you don’t like who you are in the first place. Hard to believe that there is potential within you when your life is scattered with failure, criticism, declarations that you are not good enough for…
When God told me that He loved my True Colours and that they were beautiful it was the first message of approval that I had received in a very long time. Then to discover that I was “fearfully and wonderfully made” had me looking at myself in a new way. If I truly was made beautiful, without error, by His hand, then I was not demonstrating those colours to the world.
My colours were broken! Tarnished. Messed up. But He promised me that He would restore those colours and that I was on a journey to wholeness.
But how do I know that I can be better than I am?
In the next few weeks, as the True Colours song kept coming up on the radio, God spoke to me through His words and a picture of the life cycle of a butterfly. It is almost like my own parable, bringing about new truth in my heart, if I am willing to have eyes and ears that hear what He has to say.
As I considered the life cycle of a butterfly, the Lord impressed upon me that all butterflies that fly with beautiful colours, start as ugly caterpillars. True, they are not all ugly, some can be quite striking, but they all have that fat, squishy body. There is no indication of the beautiful colours that will emerge in the future.
There is an ugly caterpillar in everyone of us.
But in the body of the caterpillar are all the design requirements and potential of a butterfly. Short of being squished or eaten, that caterpillar is destined to fulfil its life purpose of becoming a butterfly.
On a particular day, without understanding why, the change process starts in the caterpillar, and it becomes a pupae. A hidden work is done inside, in a secret place, as the very structure of the body and how it functions changes. From the outside, it looks uninteresting and uninspiring, but inside important life changes are being made in order for the caterpillar to complete its destiny and purpose in life.
I cannot judge my potential from the outside and neither can other people. God delights in taking that which the world will overlook and making something beautiful out of it.- The very day, that I decided to co-operate with the Holy Spirit, the change process started. The world cannot see the changes that are happening on the inside, supernatural changes that alter how I function, think and operate (a transformation). They happen in the secret place of my heart.
- The Holy Spirit and the Word of God shapes me into the person I am supposed to be, we are new creatures on the inside, with the potential to glorify Jesus with our lives and become like Christ.
- Now, no matter how the caterpillar or pupae behaves, it is destined to be a butterfly. God puts all that God-potential in us and with the help of the Holy Spirit, we change into the image of Christ. What was important for me to realise, was that:
Just because the caterpillar does not look and behave like a butterfly, does not mean it is not designed to be a butterfly.
Just because I don’t look and behave “like a Christian” or feel like someone who believes and trusts Jesus as her Lord and Savior, does not mean that God has not put potential in me to have a relationship with Jesus and become more and more like Him.
2 Cor 3:18 “And we, who with unveiled faces all reflect the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into His likeness with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.”
All this is my destiny and purpose because He had designed me with the potential to be like that. In the words of Phil 1:6, I am…
“being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.”
God is making me beautiful.
Each day I become more the person I am designed to be by God. Everyday, I change more into the image of Christ and represent the bride for His son Jesus. The work continues, I am packed with potential.
If you are sad about the person you are, do not forget the person you will become as you cooperate with the Spirit. He is in the business of making ugly things beautiful. I leave you with this thought:
Eccl 3:11 “He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.”
If you enjoyed this post, also see the rest of my story:
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