While Still a Caterpillar
Dear Fellow Pilgrim,
Yesterday, I was intrigued. Today, I am undone—both by the same simple, soul-stirring thought. I sat by the riverbank, where the Mayo spills its song through Mayodan, North Carolina. The sand curled cool around my toes, the current whispered softly, and beside me, my church sisters leaned into the moment—pondering eternity in the shape of water and time. What could be more spiritual than life itself?
In the hush of that hour, the old phrase rose again like mist: Life is short. "YOLO," laughed a friend, a flicker of mirth in her eyes—but also something more fragile beneath. "You Only Live Once," she explained, and I nodded—but inwardly, I winced. I’ve wrestled with that phrase before. Not because it’s wholly untrue, but because it’s only half the story.
Isn’t the truer truth this: You live once—but not only now. You live once, and if you live in Christ, you will live forever. If we are to fix our gaze on the heavenly country, if we believe in the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come, how then shall we live? Surely not as if this world is the end. Surely not with our backs to the Kingdom. No—we live as those who repent daily, who see in each sorrow a tool of salvation, who believe that our lives are not accidents, but ladders. And this earth—beautiful, aching, fading—is but a passageway, a womb of becoming.
I believed this firmly. Until the river, the sand, and my barefooted three-year-old sent my certainties tumbling like stones into the shallows. He stepped into the water with victory in his laugh, and suddenly I saw everything differently. A story, too, found its way to my ears—a sister aching with love and loss, a mother whose gaze never wanders from what matters most: childhood, presence, and eternity in the ordinary.
Meanwhile, I had been fixated on plans. Meticulously scripting my children’s homeschool days—as if salvation could be plotted on a spreadsheet. As if wisdom could be micromanaged. Even in the womb, my firstborn’s days were charted by academic vision. But today… I heard a whisper in my spirit: "Listen to her." So I did. And when she said again, "Life is too short," I finally heard what she meant. Not despair. Not urgency. But awe. I looked up. And I saw.
The river. The sand. The sky and the trees. My oldest digging for shells. My baby tasting sand with delight.
I saw two women and their children, breaking bread under open sky—no chalice in sight, yet Eucharist all the same. And then it came to me, clear as the Carolina blue above: “Life is short” is not a threat. It is a gift. Not a race against death, but a reminder to taste eternity now. For we Christians know: life does not end here. We begin eternity already,
if only we’ll look—if only we’ll live as those who know the veil is thin.
But here lies the danger—especially for the heavenly-minded like me: we forget how to live now. We become so focused on becoming that we miss being.
Let me tell you of a caterpillar. He was made to become a butterfly—yes, that’s true. But what a grief it would be if all he ever did was eat and sleep and strive, obsessed with becoming. If he missed the golden shimmer of the dew, if he forgot to laugh with his fellow crawlers, if he never paused to savor the taste of a perfect green leaf. He was always meant to become a butterfly—but he was also meant to be a caterpillar.
Beloved, the Kingdom is coming. But it is also here. Do not rush past it in the name of preparation. Do not miss the icons scattered in the dirt: the laughter of a child, the river’s hymn, the communion of saints under open sky.
Yes, life is short. But eternity has already begun.
Let us live as caterpillars who taste the leaves, knowing we were made to fly.
