A Leaf, A Worm, And Living With Our “Bad” Choices

This one’s an analogy about the consequences of seemingly “bad” choices – ours, or others around us that still end up affecting us……

At a crossroads in my life about a decade ago, I prayed a specific prayer that 6 months, a year later led to a decision that has dictated the course of my life ever since. It was not always an easy choice to live with, and had looked for a way out before, not necessarily a particularly “good” one. “Extenuating circumstances.” After all, human nature and free will being factors, surely God did not also dictate 100% how the people around me behaved. Could that be my way out? At the time, it was God’s will. But could say, an ungodly choice made by someone else provide the justification that would release me from my own promises? Horrible people at work justifying I behave horribly back? Something, anything?

No such luck.

After praying for direction, I found myself at a random Daily Bread passage describing a “work of art” of striking beauty – that turned out to be a partially eaten leaf. The “artist,” was a little wormy thing. I hate wormy things, I positively loathe them. Legless AND scaleless creatures repulse me. Especially if they don’t have shells so you can still pick em up with your bare fingers to show the Rockstar. (Not so snakes, strangely – I’ve been picking up the tame pythons in zoos and Thai tourist places my parents brought me to every chance I get ever since I was like, 9… There is a pic of me as a little girl with a huge python round my neck – and I want to get Rockstar to take a similar one and I’d post it. But we’d have to dig up that old picture of 9yr old me. And a friendly python. And temporarily hypnotize  Kings out of his huge aversion for snakes.)

Anyway. What made the picture striking and beautiful, the Daily Bread author said, was not the destruction of a leaf. Not even, I guess, the more obviously implied Work In Progress chewing on it, from which would emerge a pretty winged creature that fluttered amongst more prettiness. It was the light shining through the holes made in the leaf. The beauty that emerged through something ugly gorging itself.

Try not to think too much about the leaf getting destroyed in the process, Aileen. You don’t know what happens next:

a) the caterpillar may have dropped off onto another leaf
b) it may have stopped eating and set about cocooning itself
c) a bird might have eaten it

The not knowing, but trusting, is what they call “faith”.

Through it all, the light that is your strength, the person you learn to become shines through. It’s why God allows worms in your life. Or office.

Old pic of me and a displeased JD shortly after we arrived in HK, with IFC (International Finance Center - tallest building in background) at right... I would end up working there, among other places... There's a Laurence Lai black and white photograph of a similar backdrop on our bedroom wall...