Butterfly Chronicles Volume 74: "I Keep Waking Up"

I posted on FB what Beth Moore's mother-in-law said years and years after her 3 year old child burned and died in a fire.

"How did you live?" Beth whispered when her own child was 3.

"I didn't mean to.  I just kept waking up."

If God uses Zach's choice, it misses me.  Reality unfolds with God expecting our trust to follow His map.

Is the "I keep waking up" His point?

When someone says they think I am so strong, my mind rocks with shock.  I'm so sorry to tell you that strength evades me, lost. Travel the strength road?  The compass weighs too much.

Is the unbridled strength I see in Taylor what she sees? Does she believe in her strength?  Writing her heart, she pours on the page her blazing honesty, her vulnerability, and she inspires.  God forces her to live beyond her years.  Through it all, she succeeds, she perseveres, she handles the storms kicking and screaming her way to triumph. Determinedly she plods along life's roads. She embraces God's challenges as smoothly as waves swim around the rocks, and I want to be her. Brave. Kind.  Braver and kinder than me. She will survive.

Does Madison know she oozes strength and splashes it onto me? Does she see what I see? She travels confidently forward not even aware of a need to ask permission. A solver of unsolvable problems, she rockets ahead, fearless, doubt cremated in the fiery propulsion.  She envisions outcomes long before reality catches up. Independent.  Smarter than me. Hers, an old soul, marveling at life in such clarity I stand awed.  I learn from her - more than I can explain.  She will survive.

Michael, because of his Savior, saves us, blanketing us in his strength.  Does he see his strength in the man in the mirror? Fear grasps me, evil and dark - it says he will leave you. He will leave you.  Michael says, STOP! Stop believing fear; play up. Play up, he demands, and it comes true.  Playing up beats back fear - Michael knows this. Holding me and our girls, wearing the armor of God, Michael is armed with God's two-edged sword. In Michael's strength, God reveals He breathed life into Michael just for us. Michael shimmers, full of grace, resembling the angels in God's heavenly army. Trusting God, Michael walls us in safety.  Does he feel strong or see his own brand of strong?  He will survive.

We think we know things.  We don't even know what we don't know, and what we don't know fills an infinite universe. God draws the map, and He reveals the legs of the race to whom He will. In the most unlikely ways, God still and every day brings butterflies, and I don't deserve the constant reminders of His plan, and Zach in His plan.  I am not strong.

Maybe God plays us as a movie that we never get to see, a movie only visible by those watching on the outside.   Maybe God simply says, "Go, and keep waking up."