Bullfrogs and Butterflies…real stories of change

21. September 2009 by BruceSmith.

Bullfrogs and Butterflies…Real stories of change

Jesus was once asked, “What must a person do to inherit eternal life?  His response was, and is, intriguing.  “He must be born again”.  Literally, a person must be remade, redefined, made new in every way, from the inside out.  This was the essence of His response.  We must have change in the most fundamental senses if eternal life is to be a reality for us.  But do people really change?, one might ask.  Ask the woman Jesus encountered at the well.  She, a woman who had had several marriages in the past, and was living with a man out of wedlock when Jesus “found” her, was utterly remade, and went about telling her entire village of the transformative experience she underwent.  She changed.  Again, “Do people really change?” you ask.  And how!  Let’s take a look.

I have always been intrigued with the idea and process of transformation.  As a young kid one of the songs which captured my attention the most, at church, was “Bullfrogs and Butterflies”.  If you have not heard the song, its basically about the journey of change those two creatures go through in becoming something altogether “different”.  What begins as an unassuming start for each, winds up in a totally transformed state of being.  In the case of the bullfrog, the journey is from tiny legless water dweller to a much larger, louder, interesting and adventurous land jumper.  For the butterfly, the beginning is, of course, a bit prickly.  The little ground crawler with a less than appealing “coat” is utterly morphed into a highly skilled and beautiful flier.  Where they started was nothing like where they wound up. As the song suggests, “Bullfrogs and butterflies, they both been born again…”  Things do change.  

Tim Keller, in his inspiring book, The Prodigal God, writes of a similar tale of transformation which is played out in the film Three Seasons.  In the film, Hai, a cyclo driver, falls for a beautiful prostitute named Lan.  Lan, who lives the life of a highly paid prostitute, spending her time in hotels and luxurious settings while working, is out of reach for Hai.  Though Lan spends her professional life in the lap of luxury, she cannot live there and goes home each night to a much less glorified existence.  The life she thought she was buying for herself amidst her profession, she comes to find, leaves her empty, enslaved and brutalized.  She is far from happy.

Hai, watching her from afar, longing to be with her, enters a bicycle race, wins, and uses the winnings to pursue Lan on her lavish turf.  He uses his money for a night, pays her price, and the unexpected transformation of a life begins.  As the relationship unfolds, the drama is different from every other encounter she had ever had.  Hai, unlike the others who wanted her for her body and pleasures, just wanted to watch her sleep.  Rather than purchase a night of demeaning and short-lived ecstasy, Hai, actually purchases her heart.  He cared for her, he had no desire to use her.  This is foreign and strange to Lan, and she struggles to get her mind around it.  

For the first time ever, Lan had begun to see a glimpse of the kind of protection, security, and belonging she had wanted all those years while searching for it in all the wrong ways.  As Keller points out in his book, Lan, untrusting of Hai initially, and thinking he was seeking only to control her in some way, eventually comes to see the heart-captivating power of his desire to serve her rather than use her.  His love reveals itself so strong and pure than she cannot return to the cheap life of sexual enslavement she once knew.  Once her heart was freed by the pure love of another, she had to live differently.  Her heart drove her so, as love won the day.  She was compelled to pursue a new way of living.

Such is the love of God in our lives.  This story is played out time and  again in the pages of the bible.  Moses, a stuttering coward, was transformed into God’s man for an Exodus of unprecedented scale.  David, a little ruddy faced shepherd boy, became giant killer, king, poet, and man after God’s own heart.  Paul, formerly Saul the murderer of God’s people, became a “fool for Christ”, and a hero in the Church.  Zaccheus, hungry for God at any expense, was totally transformed.  The disciples, unassuming movement starters by any measurement, set the world on fire and changed world history, literally.  Such is the change God is able to rend in the hearts of humans.  It is still happening.

Speaking for myself, I can tell you that it was the riveting love of God in the hearts of authentic Christian people and families, over a period of years, which won me over to Him.  Watching men who invested their lives in me, my mother’s unconditional love, and the love of my grandmother, totally transformed my heart in concrete and life-altering ways.  His love for me, a broken, hungry, and needy teenager, was so real and convincing that I could not turn away.  Who, in their right mind, running headlong into the love of God again and again, would turn their back on the greatest lover and friend ever?  

As the prodigal son in Luke 15 came to realize, and many still today, leaving the house of God for the false promises of this world, always leaves us wanting.  Further, it is the ridiculous and abundant love of God which offers to us the meaning and belonging we are searching for while wallowing in the slop and muddiness of this world’s fleeting pleasures and deceptive sales pitches.

As the lives of bullfrogs and butterflies, Hai and Lan, the prodigal son, Moses, David, Paul, and so many others demonstrates, that place of being we are all searching for is to be found only in the calling of God for our lives.  It is here we learn to live and to love in a way that fulfills us and leads others to that place of hope.  It is the story of Redeeming love that transforms wounded hearts.  It is the reality of undeserved favor which ignites a longing for God and a desire to know, love and serve Him.  He is able to  transform us in the most true sense.  He can rework our minds, hearts, personalities, and all that we are.  

So the question becomes then, not, “Do people change?”, but rather, “How is a heart and life transformed?”  The answer is in the story, the greatest story ever told.  A  God, holy and complete and without any need whatsoever, motivated by love, created beings in order that they might experience Him and live in a deep and abiding relationship with Him.  Seeing those very beings turn from Him, wreck the relationship offered, and bringing death of soul upon themselves, this very God, reached down, physically came down, lived and walked among them, loved them, died for them, opened a way for the relationship to be restored, and continues to win them over one by one.  It is in the midst of this drama, this unfolding reality, that transformation takes place.  It is here that the heart leaps toward him, and it is here that the soul takes flight as never before.  Its a beautiful thing to behold.

May we all, like bullfrogs and butterflies, …be born again into this new reality.

Bruce Smith

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