Glass-Winged Butterfly

Proverbs 27:19: As water reflects a face, so a man’s heart reflects a man.


Colors capture our attention. Bright colors like yellows and reds seem to clamor loudest for consideration. Often times red can be a warning color in nature, signaling poison, a bitter taste, or conversely a bright invitation to pollinate to help carry on a plant’s life cycle. Now, greens are amazing. There are endless shades of green just in my back yard, yielding depth and texture that can only be truly treasured if you are standing actually in the yard and purposely noticing the dimensions of their pallet. Blue is like that too. Water and sky have so many shades and hues that I don’t think anyone could possibly dream up that many names for blue, although many have tried (like Benjamin Moore who named a lovely dark colored blue simply, ‘Stunning 826’).

I think people can be a bit like color. Sometimes we meet colorful people in our lives who brush in and out like a well-dipped red paintbrush adding laughter, brilliance, or even poison and leaving us changed. Other people are here to stay and their shades of green, gray or brown can be muted and lovely adding such a dimension to our lives that we could scarcely breathe without them.

Today I saw a picture of glass-winged butterfly from Panama and it is so beautiful, I cannot stop thinking of it. Its wings were iridescent, reflecting the colors of whatever it was near, and magnifying the beauty of whatever it rested on. Oh, to be like the glass-winged butterfly, reflecting the beauty I see around me, and magnifying the beauty of others who are near! So often, I will only reflect my own dark heart, brooding and worrying so much that I am missing the beauty and potential that I am actually resting on, and the words of wisdom God has prepared in other’s, will pass on by without me knowing.

It would seem that glass-winged type people are the quiet people in our lives, whose gentle spirit softly bring out the best in us, their humble strength receding to let others boisterously jangle their needed colors. However, the world would be a bit dull if we were all like the glass-winged butterfly. There would be no colors to reflect or emphasize, and so much passion, as well as the flushing lessons from angst might be lost. 

Its not my nature to be glass-winged (at least the positive elements of it). I am far more colorful than even I can handle at times! I am thankful that God works with me daily in refining my colors and helping me along in my little piece of earth.