The butterfly lay flat on the ground, a splash of color atop the waterlogged pebbles bordering the creek. It seemed an improbable — if not a fatal — way in which to encounter a butterfly. And yet, to our delight, there it was.
“Look!” my daughter squealed.
At her words, the tiny creature seemed to awaken, fluttering into flight, tumbling this way and that as though riding a hidden pocket of mischievous air.
“Let’s follow it.”
And so, we did. My daughter and I spent not an inconsequential amount of time this past weekend in the woods, following a butterfly as it careened left and then right and then toppled over midair to land in exactly the place in which we first found it.
Again. And again. And again.
Following the butterfly brought us barely a dozen yards along our path before it looped back and disappeared into the denser trees. We could follow it no further. We had other business to attend to anyway.
Still. My daughter and I counted that as our highlight from Saturday. And for a rather busy weekend filled with many places and people, that solitary butterfly comes most readily to mind when I sit with the images the weekend conjures in prayer.
You may have heard the story of Elijah under the broom tree (read: shrub or small tree) at church this weekend. It’s a story that begins in the brutality of the very real before taking a sudden and fantastical turn.
Elijah is defeated, wearied in the desert and praying for death. He closes his eyes, perhaps for the final time. But under that oddly named tree, God’s angel awakens him, a gentle touch on the shoulder. The prophet notices that from nothing, cake and water have materialized at his head right there in the desert heat. He eats, drinks and falls back to sleep.
But the angel prods him again. “Get up and eat, else the journey will be too long for you!” (1 Kings 19:7) And so Elijah does. He finds himself subsequently strengthened for the 40-day journey to come.
I’m struck by this image of the angel appearing in a moment of desolation with a gentle touch and a simple offering; this gesture, this pointing to a cake and a jug of water next to Elijah’s heads.
This is what you need. This will sustain you. Now get up and be about the work.
I wonder: Where in our ordinary days do God’s angels, God’s own Spirit, gently nudge us, direct our attention to a simple offering right there before our very eyes — a fantastical gift that nourishes us, fuels us, refills us in places we hadn’t realized we’d become empty? Bread and water, yes, but what about the many butterflies fluttering about our lives? The simple, strange ways in which God winks at us, encourages us, fills us?
This week, let us pray to be attentive to both the nudges and the gifts in all their strange, wonderful and fantastical forms. And let us, too, allow those nudges, those gifts, to spur us along the journey and to be about God’s good work.
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