Thank you for joining us!
Before we begin our devotional, I wanted to share a Comment Highlight from last week:
On Wednesday, we had a particularly good discussion about process vs outcome in our lives. I loved ALL of your responses, and I decided to share this one from
:As a rule, I'm usually impatient with myself because I'm not getting it all RIGHT NOW! I've decided to take the advice I give writers on my own Substack to do a bit every day without editing until the story is done.
Shockingly, I find myself writing more and with better results.
Crazy.
This one gave me a chuckle, as someone who just recently decided that it’s better to write a little every day. It’s amazing how much that habit can yield!
Thank you, N.M., for commenting! N.M. Scuri writes a dark fiction newsletter called Sunday Reads, and it looks utterly fantastic!
If you want a chance to be featured in next week’s Comment Highlight, all you have to do is post a comment on any of this week’s posts or threads. That’s it!
Now, on with this week’s devotional…
I don't often stop to notice the morbid, but she's there in the world around me, whether I like it or not. sometimes a snip of green flame in the snow is a caterpillar, too early, caught out, potential wings gone, a casualty of spring's more cruel mischief.
We’ve had a stretch of strange weather, lately. For days in a row we wake up to falling snow that lands and sticks up to a few inches, followed by a steady drizzle of cold rain by afternoon that washes most of it away.
I love snow. But even I’m tired of its fickle presence.
One morning, I went out with the dog as usual to walk the perimeter of the yard, letting him stop at all his favorite sniff spots to see what the coyotes and deer were up to overnight. The snow had stopped falling, and there were at least three inches already underfoot. Up ahead and from a distance I saw a tiny snip of bright green sitting on top of the snow, just to the side of our road.
I assumed it was a leaf, but as I got closer I realized it was a caterpillar.
I’m not as well-versed in caterpillar ID as I should be, but it looked very much like the cabbage loopers that always find their way onto my kale plants every year. Bright unseasonable green, quite a shock against the new snow. Sadly, it was stiff and cold, frozen through.
It was a bit of a surprise to see it there, especially on top of the snow. And it was especially odd to see it so early in the season. No doubt it was caught out by the weather, emerging just a bit too early from its egg into an inhospitable world.
I recognize it’s a little morbid to think about, and I don’t want to leave anyone feeling sad on a Monday morning. The idea of a frozen caterpillar in the snow is a tiny tragedy, one less creature able to reach its full winged potential at the right time.
But it’s the sort of tiny tragedy we see play out all the time in our lives. There’s always that little goal, dream, idea, or hope that emerges just a little bit too early, into the frigid world of negativity, or criticism, or indifference. It’s killed before it even has a chance to really evolve into something beautiful.
But that is the reason why insects—like moths and butterflies—lay so many eggs. Because the odds increase that some of their little green snips of hope will make it past the weather and the predators and become something more, something with wings. The more you hope, the more likely that hope will stick. And expand. And evolve.
One dead caterpillar, one little loss of potential, is worth the grief you can give it. But it’s not the end. Soon enough, if you wait through past the frost and late snow, there will be hope galore.
Soft hope, bright green, and singing of spring.
Thank you for reading!
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“The more you hope, the more likely that hope will stick. And expand. And evolve.” - What a beautiful truth and reminder. 🙌
Thank you for your kind shout-out! I reflect on how many times my goals were "frozen out," and how I need resilience and faith to keep on trying. I needed this.