This week's Theme: Transformations
Day 1: Put off your old self
As I wrote this month’s story blog, Chasing Butterflies, I reflected on all the different types of transformation in life, and in nature. My mind drifted to the process of molting, and immediately, I thought of the cicadas. And I remembered my patio, littered with exoskeletons…
In the spring of 2021, bulletins everywhere gave the alert, “Get ready, the cicadas are coming!” After 17 years of living underground, these intriguing insects were about to descend on the eastern United States en masse. As in billions of them.
But the phenomenon was not new or particularly alarming. These fascinating winged creatures—often confused with locusts and grasshoppers but classified in a completely different scientific family—have very interesting life cycles. Annual cicadas, as their name suggests, emerge once a year, and periodical cicadas emerge once every thirteen or seventeen years!
Periodical cicadas arrive by the billions, as if to cram thirteen or seventeen years of absence into one short cycle! Cicadas emerge as nymphs and then promptly shed their exoskeletons in order to transform themselves into winged adults. They leave a trail of exoskeleton "graveyards" under trees, in yards, on patios…
Interestingly, Scripture also describes a kind of spiritual molting that reminds me of the transformations in the animal and insect world:
You were taught, with regard to your former way of life, to put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires; to be made new in the attitude of your minds; and to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness—wrote the apostle Paul to the Ephesian Christians (Ephesians 4:22-24).
In the world of nature, transformation is radical and complete. Caterpillars become butterflies. Nymphs become cicadas. Pythons shed their skins, hawks and owls their feathers.
In the same way, true spiritual transformation entails a complete change in being—a metamorphosis from one state to another. Jesus doesn't give us rules to just follow—He offers us change to true righteousness and holiness. He calls us to radical and complete transformation, leaving the exoskeletons of corruption and deceitful desires in graveyards behind us.
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