Life, Death, and Beauty

Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Through him we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God. Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. (Rom. 5:1-5)

Romans 5 speaks of transformation and the role suffering plays in our growth as Christians. We rejoice in suffering because through suffering we gain endurance which leads to character which leads to hope, and all this will work out because of the love of God which has been poured into our hearts through the Spirit.

A few chapters later, Paul gives a name to this transformation. In Greek it’s metamorphosis, a word we associate with the transformation of a caterpillar into a butterfly.

When my kids were small, my mother-in-law would send them caterpillar gardens, little tents where you could watch caterpillars build cocoons. After the gestation period was over, they'd emerge from their self-spun coffins as beautiful butterflies. Every spring we’d release the butterflies and watch them fly away.

I always wondered what happened in the cocoon. I imagined something similar to the transformation of a werewolf in the movies—lumps bubbling all over the caterpillar’s body, the caterpillar writhing in pain, legs beginning to form, tiny humps emerging on their backs that will eventually become wings.

One day, I was listening to the radio and heard about a study that answered my question.

The experiment was simple. You might even say, barbaric. Researchers waited until the caterpillars spun their cocoons around themselves and then sliced them open to see what was happening inside. When the researchers cut open the chrysalis all they found was pale, yellow goo. The caterpillar had liquified, its organs dissolved, and its muscles melted. It had become a soup of cells.

It gets stranger. The scientists wanted to see if there was any continuity from caterpillar to butterfly, to see if the butterfly was the same “person” as the caterpillar that had spun the chrysalis from which it hatched. So they put caterpillars in a box and gassed them with a distinct smell while simultaneously zapping them with an electrical charge for ten seconds. As you would expect, the caterpillars came to hate that smell because in their little insect minds, they connected it to the feeling of being zapped. When butterflies emerged from their cocoons, they were gassed with the same smell and were immediately repelled by it. Despite the “death” that occurred in the chrysalis, the butterflies retained memories of being shocked as caterpillars. In other words, the caterpillar and the butterfly were the same insect; the caterpillar had just transformed into something unbelievably beautiful.

The metamorphosis of the butterfly reflects a familiar pattern, one of life, death, and beauty.

It appears in other areas of nature: a plant drops a seed to the ground, it dies, and comes up as a new flowering plant.

Life, death, and beauty.

We see it in the progression of covenants: life in the Garden of Eden, death through the law, beauty through the new covenant.

The Bible is full of stories that operate on this pattern. Joseph was Jacob’s favorite son. But his brothers were jealous and sold him to a band of Ishmaelites. They faked his death. Joseph really did die a death of sorts. Down into the depths he went, into slavery, into false accusations, into prison. The old Joseph was dead and buried and gone. Nothing left but a pile of goo. But that is not the end of his story. Through an amazing turn of events which cannot be explained by coincidence, he rose to the highest rank in Egypt, second only to pharaoh, and became powerful and wealthy. He saw his father again, was reconciled with his brothers, and led his people to safety in Egypt.

Life, death, and beauty.

The pattern sits in the heart of the gospel: Jesus was born as a man, he died on the cross, and he was raised in glory.

Life, death, and beauty.

It’s the outline of every conversion: living soul, death to sin, and new life through the blood of Christ. Every baptism is a reenactment of the pattern. Romans, where our metamorphosis is discussed the most, contains this description: “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life” (Rom. 6:3-4).

Life, death, and beauty.

We anticipate our own resurrection, another example of this pattern: we are born to a life destined to end in death, but we will arise one day with glorious bodies.

Life, death, and beauty.

Seven years ago I was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. Parkinson's is a movement disorder caused by the loss of dopamine receptors in your brain. No one knows the cause and there is no cure. Some have counted 40 or more symptoms that go along with P.D. The most prominent is a tremor that presents on one side of the body. It's progressive, meaning it gets worse with time. Because of my age, it took four years to get a diagnosis so I've been dealing with the disease for 11 years, since I was 37.

I found myself entering my 40s, a time that was supposed to be the prime of my life, dealing with a disease that has no cure and that only old people are supposed to have.

I remember the first day a neurologist dropped the P-bomb on me. I drove home angry with him for even suggesting such a ridiculous idea. I changed neurologists. When the second one told me the same thing, I went to a third. When the fourth one agreed with his colleagues, I had no choice but to accept that I would be dealing with a movement disorder for the rest of my life.

I had so many questions. Most of them were aimed at God: “Why did you allow me to be afflicted with this disease? I'm a minister. Why would you slow me down like this? Why do others seem to go through life so smoothly? Why me?”

Of course, the self-pity wasn't doing me any good. I needed to look at it from another angle.

I heard about that study involving the caterpillars around the time of my diagnosis. I thought about those worms reduced to a soup of cells and how God could bring them out of the ashes into beauty.

I decided to quit looking at what Parkinson's sent taken away from me and turned to what it had given me.

For one thing, I learned to take one day at a time. I used to worry about the future, focusing on things that probably would never happen. My fixation on what may never be took away from what was right under my nose. I learned to live in the present, to be where my feet were.

I learned how short life is. I had been deferring my own dreams. I decided to stop procrastinating. I learned not to bank on future days. Now is the only time that I have.

I learned how rich I was in relationships. My wife, my kids, my family, my church, my friends. So many people rallied around me. I was bathed in love.

I made a lot of new friends. Many of them are warriors fighting the same disease. Some of them are very close. We were introduced through Parkinson's.

I'm stronger because I lean on God more. I learned the truth Paul received from his thorn in the flesh: “…I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me….For when I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Cor. 12:9-10). My whole life I've been trying to rely on my own limited strength when I could have been relying on the limitless resource of God's power.

I was having lunch with an older friend who said to me, “Drew, if I could, I would take this from you. I'd trade places with you.” I told him I wouldn't give it to him if I could. I think about how much I would lose if I rewound the tape, And I couldn't bear to live without these things.

Life is going to turn you into a yellow soup. There's no getting around it. We may suffer in different ways, but we will all suffer.

There are two ways to look at this, each beautifully given a voice through poetry.

The first way is to respond with rage. It all seems so unfair. I may have to go down, but I will go down fighting. This was the option given by Dylan Thomas when his father lay dying:

Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

The second is suggested by lesser-known poem by W.S. Merwin called “Thanks.” It ends saying,

thank you we are saying and waving
dark though it is

The advice is counterintuitive. Who continues to say “thank you” as it’s growing dark? We don't learn this poem in school because it requires faith, and suffering tests our faith.

But God has proven time and again why we can be grateful for the hardship and the pain. He does it every spring. He demonstrated it in the life of Joseph and his father Jacob. He proved it when Jesus came out of the tomb. He has done it in my life, and he has done it in yours.

And because he’s shown us this pattern of life, death, and beauty over and over again, we do not have to be afraid of death. When it's coming at us like a freight train, we need do nothing more than fold our hands calmly, look up to the heavens with peace in our hearts, wave a farewell to our loved ones and say thank you.

Dark though it is.