Monarchs and Easter

On my windowsill is a sprouting acorn that sits on top of a little vase. A taproot extends from the acorn and down into the water. In the opposite direction, a small tree is growing with three leaves at the top that seem to be getting bigger every day. It's a chestnut oak. At least the acorn came from a chestnut oak and the leaves look like a chestnut oak, so I'm saying that it's a chestnut oak. I'm always amazed and intrigued about that. If you had never seen or heard about how seeds reproduce, and I showed you an acorn, and told you that a tree would come from an acorn, you would say that I'm crazy!

It's a little bit like Easter. It doesn't all make sense, at least not in my brain. But it's an amazing thing, at least if you experience it in your heart.

It reminds me of a story that I got to be a part of years ago. For those of you that have ears that are unaccustomed to the occasional cuss word, please excuse the language. For the most part, I try to use appropriate words, but in this case, I feel that the cuss words are "value added".

Some of my friends and I used to hang out with an older fellow named Paul, who lived back in the woods.

We did lots of shooting and plinking and sitting around the fire drinking coffee. Now Paul was pretty much a saint. Didn't cuss, smoke, chew, or drink. When he got the cancer, his brother Oscar moved in with him for a while. Oscar was the opposite of Paul. Full of vulgar and bitterness. I don't say this in a demeaning way. They are both gone now. I will blame the bitterness on him being thrown into some of the worst that World War II had to offer.

At the time the Gypsy Moth outbreak was just starting. The white oaks and chestnut oaks were especially hard hit and there were dead trees everywhere, especially on the mountain tops. 

"Those damn stupid people call it a moth, well it's a damn worm killing them trees, a damn worm!" 

In as mild a manner as I could find, I asked Oscar if he had ever heard of a monarch butterfly or how they morphed from a caterpillar to a butterfly. He said that he had never heard of such a thing, but that he had seen some strange things in his day.

Later that summer I captured a monarch caterpillar and some milk weed, put them in a glass quart jar with some holes in the lid, and took it up to the cabin.

After a week or so it did its thing and turned into a chrysalis. Oscar didn't say much other than it didn't look like a butterfly. Somehow the jar got buried under a bunch of stuff in a corner of the cabin and pretty much forgotten about for a month or so. One day I remembered and asked if the monarch had hatched yet. And so Paul went to check. And there it was, a beautiful monarch butterfly. Poor thing. Deader than a hammer. But it was a butterfly.

And Oscar.

"Well I'll be damned! They never taught that in school. Damn. Well I'll be damned! I've seen some strange things in my day, but never that! I'll be damned."

As a Christian, Easter is a special holiday for me. Now I was blessed to grow up in a Christian family, but even then, being a Christian is something that I chose, and not something that was forced onto me.

And so I have this faith that God wants me as a friend. That's the way it was intended, that we would all have a relationship with him and live on the right side of things. But he wanted us to have free will and to choose to follow him. And even when we say that we choose to follow him we often do our own thing anyway. And we mess up a lot because in this life there will always be those temptations to put ourselves ahead of what God wants.

Even then, if we want it, God offers us eternal life in a new heaven and a new earth where we won't have any of those temptations and we will live in a place that is the way life was meant to be.

The only tough part is that all we have to do is believe in the whole Easter story, that Jesus died for my sins and rose again. Somehow, when we believe that Jesus died on the cross for us, everything, all of our wrongs that we ever did  were made right.

This goes against our human way of thinking. We think that if we do enough good then you are in, and if not you're out. But that's not what Jesus said. 

 And there is a case for Jesus. There were lots of prophecies that predicted his coming, how he would live and how he would die. And he said that he would rise from the dead. And there is historical evidence that he did rise from the dead.

So all you have to do is believe. But it doesn't all make sense, at least not to me. But it's God's way and in believing, I've acquired this undeniable joy inside of me. One that I can't argue with. Sometimes when I go through a tough time, but still feel at peace, I feel a little bit like I think Oscar did when he first saw the butterfly. I can't explain what Christ did, but it's like I've seen it first hand. I still struggle with wanting things my own way, but I know that one day, I'll get to live in a new earth, and it will probably be similar to the one we live in, but minus everything that is wrong in our current. Everything will be God's way.

So I believe that by accepting and believing that Jesus died on the cross for me, and that he rose from the dead, that his way will get me through this life and into the next. And I can't be thankful enough for that!

And maybe that really doesn't make sense, but neither does the monarch!