The Struggle

I don't think any of us come to a point in our lives when we want things to be difficult or hard either for us personally or for anyone that we love or care about.  We would much rather prefer that everything float along easily the way we would want it to float without any bumps in the road.  Unfortunately, that's just not the real world...or not the world that I live in anyway. We aren't immune to tough times. As a matter of fact, oftentimes, it's those tough times that allow us to see what kind of intestinal fortitude that we have inside of us.  It can very well be that the struggle is what makes us stronger. The following story is a great example of that.

A man found a cocoon of the emperor moth and took it home to watch it emerge. One day, a small opening appeared, and for several hours the moth struggled but couldn't seem to force its body past a certain point. Deciding something was wrong, the man took scissors and snipped the remaining bit of cocoon. The moth emerged easily, its body large and swollen, the wings small and shriveled. The man expected within a few hours the wings would spread out in the natural beauty, but they did not. Instead of developing into a creature free to fly, the moth spent its short life dragging around a swollen body and shriveled wings. What the man learned was the constricting cocoon and the struggle necessary to pass through the tiny opening are God's way of forcing fluid from the body into the wings. The "merciful" snip was, in reality, cruel. Sometimes the struggle is exactly what we need.