Coming Through Into Your Season of Change
A couple of weeks ago, I taught the ladies in our Wednesday Women’s Worship Facebook group about the new season that we’re in. With the new season of fall comes a sense of change up ahead. We love to change our Fall Decor as the weather begins to change. I love seeing all my sweet mom friends post about all things harvest, orange leaves and pumpkin-spiced lattes!
This is also a wonderful time with all of the Jewish Feasts and New Year this month. I love learning about them!
There is this idea that with the new season upon us, God wants to renew areas of our lives. In the past season and month, it feels like you have been through a squeezing or a pressing.
I have felt it myself!
It can feel as if the walls have closed in on you and you’re squeezing through, barely making it. I have issues with tight spaces, feelings of claustrophobia. It makes me feel as if I can’t breathe. You can’t see what’s up ahead.
It reminds me of a teaching I heard about Monarch butterflies. I’ve written about what these beautiful creatures endure as they are growing and going through their metamorphosis.
10-14 days after the monarch forms its chrysalis, it will become transparent, revealing the magnificent butterfly inside. Once it’s completely transparent, you know it will emerge that day.
Seconds after the butterfly emerges it will look nothing like the majestic monarchs you’ve seen fluttering through your garden. Its wings will be small and crumpled, and its abdomen will be plump and filled with fluids.
Newly emerged butterflies must be able to hang down so their wings can expand and dry properly. If they don’t have room to do this, their wrinkled and deformed wings will keep them grounded for life.
If a butterfly falls from its chrysalis and is not immediately placed back up to hang down, its wings will be deformed and it will never fly.
WOW!
Monarch butterflies begin to appear this month around where some of you live. I love how their arrival is a great example of what change looks like: leaving the last season and coming into the new season ahead.
They say the most difficult part of the metamorphosis process is when the newly formed butterfly has to squeeze its way out of the chrysalis. It’s squeezing through its narrow place! While it is squeezing through, the fluid is being forced into its wings, causing them to expand. If it didn’t do so, its wings would never form properly!
So when you see a monarch, you know it made it through its tight place.
I have a group of women I spend time with daily on an App called Marco Polo. It’s been such a wonderful experience as we pray for one another and get into the intimate spaces of each other’s lives.
As we have been walking together closely, we’ve become so close that we share our “tight places” with one another.
As I was sitting in my car in front of my house one day this week, I shared with my “Warrior Sisters” about my current tight place and I caught sight of my first Monarch butterfly of the season! It flew right past my window and I squealed mid-sentence! I was giddy, laughing and telling them all about how I had just heard a teaching on Monarch butterflies. They are becoming more rare. So when you see one, you should take a moment to thank God for Him bringing you through your tight season!
After finishing my conversation on Marco Polo, I tracked the butterfly I had seen to a neighbor’s house two-doors down who unbeknownst to me, had a butterfly bush. The video below shows how there were many Monarch butterflies that had more than likely just hatched!
I needed that God-wink moment! God knows the season I’ve been in better than anyone. There are no coincidences, only divine appointments!
I’ve felt that squeezing and pressure, just like when I gave birth to my babies. You feel the need to push. There’s a pressing.
Are you feeling that tight-squeeze season too?
I was listening to a daily devotional recently about how Jesus said to remember Lot’s wife. He said. “Whoever tries to keep their life will lose it, and whoever loses their life will preserve it” (Luke 17:32–33).
Maybe He used her as an example because she did exactly what she was told NOT to do! I’ve often thought, “Why was that SO bad?”
Perhaps it was that by looking back at Sodom, she showed heart was torn between the place she was leaving and where she was being led.
Here was God, sending an angel to basically take them by the hand and leading them out of an awful place! He was SAVING them! But here she was, more than likely, imagining the life that she had made there.
She was stuck in a place of indecision but was really… disobedience.
What it showed was she wanted what she had more than what God had up ahead for her.
And it cost her her life.
Maybe God is asking you to go through your tight-squeeze season to develop you for what He has up ahead. What has He asked of you to move you forward into His purposes for you. Are you looking at where you are now or what you had and not looking ahead? Are you like Lot’s wife, staying stuck somewhere in the middle? The in-between?
Allow God to get you through the tight-squeeze and move you into your new season. Change really is up ahead!
Remember- Just like the Monarch butterfly, if you don’t go through the tight-squeeze season, you won’t be able to fly either.
Because that’s what God wants for us.
To fly.
“There is freedom waiting for you,
On the breezes o the sky,
And you ask, “What if I fall?”
Oh but my darling,