stories

A man found a cocoon for a butterfly. One day a small opening
appeared, he sat and watched the butterfly for several hours
as it struggled to force its body through the little hole. Then
it seemed to stop making any progress. It appeared as if it
had gotten as far as it could and could go no farther. Then the
man decided to help the butterfly.

He took a pair of scissors and snipped the remaining bit of the
cocoon. The butterfly then emerged easily. Something was
strange. The butterfly had a swollen body and shriveled wings.
The man continued to watch the butterfly becaused he
expected at any moment, the wings would enlorge and expand
to be able to support the body, which would contract in time.
Neither happened. In fact, the butterfly spent the rest of its
life crawling around with a swollen body and deformed wings.
It was never able to fly.

What the man in his knidness and haste did not understand,
was that the restricting cocoon and the struggle required for
the butterfly to get through the smallopening of the cocoon
are God's way of forcing fluid from the body of the butterfly
into its wings so that it would be ready for flight once it
achieved its freedom from the cocoon. Sometimes struggles
are exactly what we need in our life.

If God allowed us to go through all our life without any
obstacles, that would cripple us. We would not be as strong as
what we could have been. Not only that, we could never fly.

There once was a little girl who had a bad temper. Her mother gave
her a bag of nails and told her that every time she lost her
temper, she must hammer a nail into the back of the fence. The
first day the girl had driven 37 nails into the fence. Over the
next few weeks, as she learned to control her anger, the number of
nails hammered daily gradually dwindled down. She discovered it was
easier to hold her temper than to drive those nails into the fence.

Finally the day came when the girl didn't lose her temper at all. She
told her mother aabout it and the mother suggested that the girl now
pull out one nail for each day that whe was able to hold her
temper. The days passed and the young girl was finally able to tell
her mother that all the nails were gone. The mother took her
daughter by the hand and led her to the fence. She said, "you have
done well, my daughter, but look at the holes in the fence. The
fence will never be the same. When you say things in anger, they
leave a scar just like this one. You can put a knife in a person
and draw it out. It won't matter how many times you say I'm sorry,
the wound is still there. A verbal wound is as bad as a physical
one. Friends are very rare jewels, indeed. They make you smile and
encourage you to succeed. They lend an ear, they share words of
praise and they always want to open their hearts to us.