Not perfect, but better

When my husband dragged the old dresser off his truck after yard-saling, my first reaction was “ugh”! Painted a sick dark green, missing knobs, gouged, and full of stickers and marker-pen graffiti, it was a sight. But we’d already decided to join our neighbor in holding a yard sale, so I took on the task of making it “marketable.”  After washing it down, I primed and then painted it.  We found enough matching knobs.  Behold, it was soon ready for a second life. Not perfect, but better.

As I worked away, I thought how it might illustrate how Jesus redeems us from “ugh” lives marred and damaged by sin. Paul wrote about the process in 2 Corinthians 5:17:

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come.

The analogy isn’t perfect, however. The dresser got an exterior makeover with paint, but Jesus works through transformation, from the inside out:

We...are being transformed into his [Jesus’] likeness with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit. (2 Corinthians 3:18)

My parents gave me this

butterfly necklace when

I graduated from a one-year

intensive Bible school course.

The word “transformed” comes from the Greek metamorphoo, which of course is related to the English word for “metamorphosis” in the insect world. After a brief life consumed with “consuming,” a caterpillar is enveloped in an ugly sac called a chrysalis. Within it, the caterpillar transforms to a butterfly, finally emerging into a new life. No wonder that this amazing process eventually became a symbol for the spiritual reality of being “born again.”

Jesus, in fact, had some harsh words about religious leaders of His day who excelled at "pretend-religion." They tried to look good on the outside but had dark, wretched, proud, judgmental hearts. He didn’t win any popularity contests with them, especially when He called them “whitewashed tombs,” pretty on the outside but full of death inside (Matthew 23:27-28).

I won’t say my refurbished dresser was totally “pretty on the outside.” It was still an old, scarred dresser.  But it had a second chance at being useful. And that’s just like God.  No matter how beat up and scarred we get from our bad choices and the inevitable hard places in life, He can still renew and use us. 

The rest of the story on the dresser?  A woman driving by our home a few days before the sale noticed it with its dangling price tag amidst other sale items we were gathering in the driveway. She was putting her 90-something mother in a care home and it was just what she needed as she prepared the room. 

Beyond cocoons

I’d just come back from my morning walk, a bit discouraged from a time of talking to God about hurting people I know, when He surprised me with a gift the size of a quarter. On a dead rose I spotted a tiny butterfly with exquisite black and white wings. “I made that,” God seemed to be reminding me. “I planned the process through which caterpillars become butterflies or moths. Can you trust me for greater things in these persons’ lives?”

“Metamorphosis”—that’s the scientific term for the process through which caterpillars turn into winged beauties. I recall it being one of those wicked “challenge” words for Third Grade Spelling. But as an adult I realized how God used this miracle of nature to illustrate what can happen in a human heart. The word shows up in the original Greek of New Testament scriptures: metamorphoo, meaning “to change into another form.” One place it’s used is Romans 12:2: “Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” Another is 2 Corinthians 3:18: “And we, who with unveiled faces all reflect the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his likeness with ever-increasing glory” (boldface added).

In both cases, according to Vine’s Expository Dictionary, the word expresses a complete change of human character and conduct under the power of God.

In the natural world, a caterpillar doesn’t suddenly become a butterfly. There’s a dying, then a hidden creative process of a new likeness. Breaking out of the chrysalis to become a butterfly is a strenuous process. Once out, it must join the halves of its proboscis together, pump up and dry out the wings, harden the exoskeleton, and firm up legs and other body parts.

In the spiritual world, in being “transformed” into Christ’s likeness, we’re up against more—a lot more. Obeying God in changing things about one’s life isn’t easy. And some simply resist that change. So why pray for these stubborn believers?

J. Oswald Sanders, whose insightful book Spiritual Leadership I try to read every few years, helped lead me to an answer. “People are difficult to move,” he wrote. “It is much easier to pray for things or provisions than to deal with the stubbornness of the human heart. But in just these intricate situations the leader must use God’s power to move human hearts in the direction he believes to be the will of God. Through prayer the leader has the key to that complicated lock” (Moody, 1994, p. 90).

So, for now, even though I see these people preferring their confining cocoons of old ways, I keep praying. God sees what they could become through spiritual metamorphosis, and His plan is beautiful--like that little butterfly who, after my “grace lesson,” flitted away.