Chrysalis to Completion.

Butterfly caterpillars create something called a “Chrysalis” – a hardened exoskeleton that protects it whilst it changes. It’s cellular structure has already prepared it for the changes to come, and once the process has ended successfully? You have a butterfly!

But if you cut the chrysalis open before the transformation is complete? You will end up with with a dead pupa instead of a fully formed butterfly because the PROCESS OF TRANSFORMATIVE HEALING AND RESTORATION WAS ABORTED.

Deformed Chrysalises Look like this:

Improperly placed silk strands cause it to be half covered, so it’s half caterpillar/half chrysalis.

The older caterpillar might have already begun forming wings before the chrysalis forms, but then they slide off before reattaching during the transformation process.

Someone or something interferes with the chrysalis, and the damage to the protective layer aborts the process.You end up with pupa soup instead of a fully formed—or formed at all—anything.

The Parable…

Half in, half out. Some of us have only partially committed out will to Christ, submitting only the parts we want to submit rather than all of us. We half in and half out.

God ain’t that kind of God. If you gone be down with Him, be all the way down. He really doesn’t just change the parts that you want… it literally don’t go like that. You will either submit yourself or…life does what it does which is pretty clear: deceit, death, and destruction.

Healed but not restored. So there is free; then there is free indeed. God is in the business of healing AND restoration. Lots of us tend to go to God for the initial healing, but never access the fullness of God’s Will which is to restore. While the bone is no longer broken, we still walk with a limp. In life, perhaps you’ve been healed of a habit or a relationship or an offense but still carry the burden of its affects. Well, God don’t want that for you. God wants you to be released from those things and placed in a position of overflowing blessing. He wants you to be restored so that the habits and affectations and fears created alongside that pain be eradicated as well.

People pleasing produces irreparable damage. We cannot always avoid the ways in which people impact us negatively. As the saying goes: Hurt people hurt people. Lots of people wounded prior to our contact with them move about life all willy-nilly unintentionally damaging folks without realizing it. Jesus said that offense would come; it’s unavoidable and in fact avoiding it is unallowable. God uses it for our cleansing, instruction, preparation, and character exposure. Offense show us who we are, and who we are yet becoming—the places where grace yet abounds and the strongholds we are yet pulling down in the power of Christ. If we get stuck focused on the people causing the offense rather than the Savior who causes the fruit of the spirit to grow and remain? Then we will never mature into the beauty of holiness that God wants for us.

Many of you are aborting the God work of perfecting in your life cuz:

You don’t like how it feels.
You don’t like the isolation it brings.
You don’t like the how people respond to your changes.
You think it’s taking too long.
You aren’t sure of the results.
You don’t trust the process.

Let Jesus set you FREE. Allow Him to wrap you up in HIS loving embrace and stay there til you are made complete. God doesn’t need your help in transforming you into who He created you to be—only your willing, continued and consistent cooperation in the process. God knows what you ought to be. And it is not dragging yourself across the ground, nor dangling forever unfinished between what was and what could be. His Will is that your soul prosper, you be in good health, you be prosperous in every way, and that you mount up with wings as an eagle and soar, taking no thought of what you need because God has supplied it.

Don’t buck the system. Don’t abort the process. Let patience have its perfect work in you.