My seven year old granddaughter Kaylee and I recently participated in Monarch Madness at Neal Smith National Wildlife Refuge* near Prairie City. We were educated about the life cycle of the monarch butterfly, before being sent out to capture monarchs so they could be tagged and identified.
With net in hand, we walked out into the wet, tall prairie grasses that were well over our heads, in search of the elusive and beautiful monarch butterflies. We got one into our net early on, but I didn’t react soon enough to keep it in the net and it flew away. Those that were netted, were carefully taken to one of the
designated persons who knew how to handle and tag them without hurting them.
As the morning wore on and warmed up, we became more and more
discouraged with not netting a monarch. And then Kaylee reminded me that it was a beautiful day and we were there to enjoy it and celebrate God’s creation.
How often we look for one specific thing and if that one thing doesn’t happen we feel like it has been a failure. But maybe something else was there and we missed it because we had our heart set on a specific thing. Maybe we were
looking for the wrong thing.
As we prepare for our annual Stewardship Campaign to underwrite the 2015 budget, let us be open to God’s leading. Let us be open to what God might be wanting to show us. Maybe God has something even more spectacular in mind for us than we have even imagined.
Kaylee and I didn’t net a monarch to be tagged but we did enjoy time together, got some good exercise and experienced God’s beautiful creation!
To God Be The Glory!
Pastor Candice
*Neal Smith National Wildlife Refuge (formerly Walnut Creek), located in Jasper County, Iowa, is a unit of the National Wildlife Refuge System administered by the federal government. The Refuge was created by an act of Congress in 1990 to re-create 8600 acres of tallgrass prairie and oak savanna, the native plant and animal communities existing in central Iowa prior to Euro-American settlement in the 1840′s.
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