Day 363--I think I can make it! I think I can! Just kidding.  Day 13 I think...

Check this out:

“For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.”
-Romans 7: 15-16

Is that some Biblical OCD or what?  Thanks Gretchen Rubin for posting this on her Happiness Project blog today.   Who knows, the next thing we could be reading is Galatians' struggle to upload photos to facebook. Our problems always seem so current. Like we invented the human experience. Funny how there's really nothing new under the sun.  Except anything Mark Zuckerburg touches.

It's just part of the human experience to wrestle with ourselves.  Struggle is inherent in growth.

I was at a great meeting many years ago when a person shared the following experience from his own warped childhood.  This story was a game-changer for me.  A total paradigm shifter.  And not warped at all.

He had collected a caterpillar from the woods for a school project.  He put it in the jar with the holes in the lid.  He watched excitedly as it built it's chrysalis.  He waited and waited and then at long last movement started happening.  The process of emerging from the cocoon was long and at one point the butterfly got caught on a piece of the chrysalis.  It clung to his wing and wouldn't come off.  He said it seemed like an eternity but it probably wasn't as long as it seemed to a 10 year old boy.  So he did what any helpful little boy would do, he helped the butterfly by removing this tiny bit of stuff from its wings.

He said what happened next was so chilling and devastating that it took him many months to recover from it.  The butterfly apparently began to slow the movement of its wings. It became motionless and finally died.

He told us that he recounted this story to his elderly father and asked him 'Why Dad, why? I was just trying to help him!'  His father replied 'son, we all have to struggle in order to survive.  The struggle is the key.'

We all have to struggle in order to survive.  The struggle is the key.

Well there you go.