butterfly-ing

I had coffee with a friend of mine yesterday.  He is a fascinating person.  When he and his wife should be looking hard at retirement, they are instead leaning into God’s plan.  When they should be staying close to medical facilities due to his wife’s advancing scleroderma, they continue to run an orphanage five hours south of El Paso, Texas.  Amazing.

Our conversation somehow veered toward talking about each of our experiences working on Native American Reservations.  Many years ago he worked as a Special Education teacher on a Ute Indian Reservation in the Four Corners area.   This was a hard but wonderful time as he came to understand and appreciate the wonder and beauty of the Ute culture. 

On many evenings he taught ESL classes for adults.  During one lesson he was using the example of a butterfly to help the class better understand the specificity inherent to English.

“A butterfly walks along a leaf.  A butterfly drinks the nectar from the flower.  A butterfly flaps its wings and flies.”

He thought this was a simple lesson on the various ways English can be used to describe basic activities.  The students just stared in bewilderment.  They didn’t get it.  And though he kept repeating himself, describing over and over again the different actions a butterfly may perform, it wasn’t connecting to the students.  Finally a young woman in the class spoke up.

“We understand what you are saying.  But we don’t understand why you would say it.  We understand that a butterfly does all those things.  But where you focus on each individual act, we would simply say the butterfly is ‘butterfly-ing’.  All the things you describe are part of what it does, not what it is.  When a butterfly is flying, walking or drinking, we would say it is ‘being’.  That is the difference between you and us.  You focus on the pieces and we see the whole.”

As a friend of mine would say, “That’ll preach.”  This woman understood a drawback to westernized thinking.  We can focus on the parts and miss the whole.  We tend to compartmentalize.  To divide and conquer.  To distill issues, actions and even relationships down to manageable chunks.  But in doing this, we so often miss the big picture.  We miss the “being-ness” of life.

I will sing praise to my God while I have my being.  Psalm 104:33

How much healthier would I be if I spent more time “being” and less time “doing”?  My efforts to improve my actions often obscure and distract me from the man God has redeemed me to be.  I have become an expert in distilling down and picking at parts that need improvement, but missing the truth of who I am.  Maybe the answers lie more in understanding in stillness what God has created me to be.  Instead of walking, drinking and flapping, maybe I need to start “butterfly-ing”.

Be still, and know that I am God Psalm 46:10