Lobsters, Butterflies, and Cake

          Last week I ended by talking about oysters. This week I’ll begin with lobsters.

          Lobsters are said to be protected by the shell that a full-grown man could stand on while the lobster is in the water, and not harm it.

But this shell that protects the lobster also confines the lobster. The lobster cannot grow past the size of its stationery and protective shell.

In order for the lobster to grow, it must shed its protection which means it willingly becomes vulnerable. Underneath the shell, there is just a thin, pink, membrane skin, the consistency of wet, tissue paper; the lobster is vulnerable.

So, the lobster has a choice to stay protected and forever remain the same, or to be willing to risk everything to grow. Most of the time, the lobster will choose growth – even if it is risky, and causes his life to be shaky for a period of time.

We, too, must choose growth, spiritual growth. Spiritual growth can happen when we choose to view life from a higher perspective; a perspective higher than a judgmental and critical mind.

Some of us grew up in the Fifties. We remember those black and white shows on the little 6 inch screen. Those shows seemed very simple, sweet, and idyllic. No matter what was going on, it all happened quickly and within half an hour, there was a happy ending.

Many of us got conditioned to think life was really supposed to be, like “Ozzie and Harriet,” or “Leave It to Beaver.”  Possibly we thought life was supposed to be really easy and that we would never have any real conflicts come into our lives.

I believe that one of the reasons why Christianity or any religious approach is appealing. It appeals because it promises to make life easier; it promises that God is good, and it promises there can be an ease in our lives.

But challenging things keep taking place in our lives, often we can't quite figure out whether it is happening to us because we fail to understand God,
or perhaps we are being taught a lesson, or maybe we are misapplying God's ideas somehow; and we ask what am I doing wrong? Or we affirm, “I must be doing something wrong.

When we say that, “I must be doing something wrong,” we affirm incompleteness; but remember what I said last week, “We are whole people living in a whole universe.” We are whole people who make errors and errors can be corrected.

It takes a little bit of being tested, a lot of contemplation, seeking, a lot of prayer, a lot of guidance, and asking around in church, a lot of going out into the world and serving people—to help us understand that we are not misapplying the biblical principles, that things actually are just perfect the way they are. Puzzling, isn’t it? I’ll un-puzzle that for you in a moment.

To help understand this process, imagine what a caterpillar might feel like if it were crawling across a Persian rug. From its point of view crawling across that rug, it must encounter a lot of strange things
before its eyes. It probably would make no sense with colors changing right and left. It would just seem like a mish-mash of colors and feelings, just like life sometimes appears to us.

But one day, when that caterpillar becomes a butterfly, it can fly over that very same rug, and it will see something else. It will be able to see
the patterns of color in that rug and it will all make sense. It will see that there really was a design to the mish-mash. That design of the so called mish-mash is based upon the outworking of “The Law of Life (or we could call it biblical principles)” which we might define this way: The spirit of God working through our consciousness = the experience of our life.

So that un-puzzles why things are perfect just the way they are: the spirit of God working through our consciousness equals the experience of our life.

It’s not that we misapplied the law; the law is dependable and only works one way. There is however one variable there - your consciousness - and you can choose what you want to hold in your consciousness again and again, and again and again, as often as needed.

Here’s an article I read online.

“Have a bite of flour.

Yuck!

A little baking soda, then?

Blech!

How about a raw egg?

Ick!

A spoonful of cooking oil?

Nasty!

Maybe a little sugar? A nip of vanilla? A bit of chocolate?

Yeah, those sound good … but all by themselves?

The individual ingredients aren’t very appetizing, yet when they are mixed together and cooked in a hot oven, they come together to form a beautiful and mouth-watering cake.

The individual ingredients of life often aren’t very appetizing, either.

Yet mixed together throughout a lifetime and cooked through love, they form a rich and lovely life.”

There are really only two ways to respond to our experience of life, with love or with fear. When we respond with love, whatever is touched by that love begins/continues to heal.  When we respond with fear, yes we do deepen the pain and struggle… however, there is something much more important to realize; when we respond with fear we are really deeply calling out for love.

Our job is not to set things aright, that’s (God’s job) the job of unconditional love. Our job is to see things aright; in other words, that our experience of ourselves and others is either an extension of love or a call for love.

Seeing things aright is a vital step in allowing love to do its healing work.

I have given you three metaphors for a higher vision this morning. It is so important to have a spiritual vision for our life and to have that higher point of view, and to look at our life with some perspective to see the underlying design or pattern, like the butterfly; to look at our lives and see that the ingredients of our life may be un-tasty at any given moment but combined together with an awareness of the Presence of unconditional love (God) and the extension of that love into everything we express, feel, and think (to the best of our understanding) heals what needs healing; to look at your life and to put down your defenses, be vulnerable so those old constricting ideas can be healed, enlarged, enlightened by love.

It becomes very important how we respond to life in the moment.

Contemplate this. Contemplate your life, just the way it is. Everything is an extension of love or a call for love.

All the yucky ingredients, all the dizzying mish-mash of feelings, all the tender vulnerabilities you are willing to uncover  are your opportunities to bathe them in love and heal your life.

And you can do it!