HARDWICK – One of my favorite books to help small children understand death and renewal is based on the life cycle of a dragonfly.
Dragonfly eggs are laid in or near water and that is where they are born and live most of their lives. Aquatic nymphs, or baby dragonflies, live at the bottom of ponds and streams, using gills in their abdomen to extract oxygen from water. They grow by molting, shedding their exoskeleton many times.
Then something unthinkable happens to this water-breathing gilled creature who has only seen the surface of their pond looking from the bottom side up. This stage is called transition, emergence or transformation. When a nymph is ready to become an adult, it climbs out of the water to shed its skin and develop wings, changing from a water-breathing organism to an air-breathing one.
Adult dragonflies breathe air and can no longer survive underwater. They can hold their breath for a limited time but are not aquatic.
The nymph can no more imagine being a flying, air-breathing creature than we can imagine becoming new or resurrected. The freed dragonfly can never again operate under water. The change is an explosion of renewal, much like the resurrection of Jesus celebrated during Easter.
Many of us have experienced the sense of trying to breath under water, enslaved by our own faults, addictions and imperfections. We become freed only by trusting the unimaginable life God has in store for us.
We can have an Exodus out of slavery just like the people of God in Moses’ time. God brings us from exile to renewal, from exodus to resurrection, from underwater to flight. Our borders are widened. We are freed to pursue a promised land of peace, love, joy, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. It isn’t always easy and sometimes it takes years of wandering to get there but Christ offers Himself, the Holy Spirit, to see us through, to comfort and guide us; filling us with a power that we can never create on our own.
How then do we live our lives with this explosion of change? How do we move from exile to renewal? How do we move from exodus to resurrection? How do we come up out of the water and breathe air on gossamer wings? A verse from Colossians gives us a hint: “Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things.” (Colossians 3)
The verse is about our faith and our focus. If we have been raised with Christ resurrected, out of our exile and fault, we seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God.
Renewed, we set our minds on the things that are above, not on earthly things, because our old lives have died and our new life is hidden in freedom to breathe and to fly.
There’s hope and power and love beyond explanation available right now as we understand death no longer has dominion over us. We are free to live a glorious new way of being, much like the dragonfly or the caterpillar, freed to be a butterfly.
From an earth dweller to a freedom flier. From one hidden away in a cocoon of its own making to a transformed thing of beauty floating on the wind. And that beauty can transform other people’s lives even if only for a moment.
Set your minds on things above and not on earthly things. That focus helps us keep things, and people that annoy us, or whom we overlook here on earth in perspective.
That focus helps us concentrate on loving and serving others as our spiritual mandate.
That focus forms us into an inexpressibly free people of God; free to love, free to worship, free to start anew; free to allow God to use us, even in simple ways to impact those around us for the good; free to be a people of hope knowing that no human being has the final word but a love beyond imagination works for us and in us.
That’s worth setting our minds on things above and not on earthly things.
May your Springtime be filled with renewal and transformation.
Rev. Avril Cochran is currently the pastor at The United Church of Hardwick.
