We are butterflies

[rocklobster]

OK, here's a story that i found in a Chicken Soup book that I think everyone needs to hear:
Once there was a boy who loved butterflies. One day, he found a cocoon. He ecstatically put the cocoon on his windowsill and eagerly awaited the day when the butterfly would emerge. When the butterfly began to emerge, he was even more excited. But the butterfly was having a difficult time of it, and the boy became concerned. He opened the cocoon and the butterfly emerged, but was unable to fly. Its wings were too heavy.
The boy's father happened to be an entymologist, someone who studies insects. He asked his father what went wrong. His father calmly explained that as the butterfly struggles, it is shaking the mucus off its wings. If you do not allow it to do this, its wings become too heavy and it cannot fly.
The moral: we are that butterfly. This is why we struggle. God wants us to be able to fly. If we did not struggle, we would be unable to fly.

[Nate]

But...if He's all-powerful, he COULD make us able to fly without struggling. So I don't get it.

[alma]

I can see that story as an illustration of our daily struggle with our own old habits and everything that we do that is a burden to become what God intended us to be.
Ephesins 4:17-23
"Therefore, I tell you and insist on in the Lord not to live any longer like the gentiles live, thinking worthless thoughts. They are darkened in their understanding and separated from the life of God because of their ignorance and hardness of heart. Since they have lost all sense of shame, they have abandoned themselves to sensuality and practice every kind of sexual perversion without restraint. However, that is not the way you came to know the Messiah. Surely you have listened to him and have been taught by him, since truth is in Jesus. Regarding your former way of life, you were taught to strip off your old nature, which is being ruined by its deceptive desires, to be renewed in your mental attitude, and to clothe yourselves with the new nature, which was created according to God’s image in righteousness and true holiness."
It is something God tell us to do and we also have his help, he gives us strength and guidance.