A small child finds a caterpillar in the garden and excitedly brings it inside, finds a jar, fills it with leaves and watches in wonder as it builds its chrysalis. The first thing the child does every day as he gets out of bed is to check the jar. One day a small hole appears in the chrysalis and a butterfly starts to struggle to come out. The child watches and starts to worry that the butterfly won’t make it out of the chrysalis, so he decides the butterfly needs some help. He takes a pair of scissors and makes the hole big enough for the butterfly to tumble out. The butterfly falls out but its body is swollen and its wings shriveled. The child waits expectantly for the butterfly to spread its wings and fly, but it never does.

In his kindness what the child didn’t understand was that the butterfly needed the struggle to push the fluid from its body to its wings to strengthen them. Without the struggle the butterfly will never fly.

~ Pastor John

On December 17 1903 bicycle shop owners Orville and Wilbur Wright sent a telegram to their hometown from Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. The now-famous telegram reads:

Success four flights Thursday morning all against twenty-one mile per hour wind started from level with engine power alone average speed through air thirty-one miles longest 57 seconds inform press home Christmas. Orevelle Wright.

The telegram was the announcement of the first ever powered, sustained and controlled aeroplane flight. A momentous, historic, world-changing occasion. There’s an apocryphal story told that the headline of the local paper that day was: Wright Brothers Home For Christmas. Now, no doubt, that news was worth celebrating, but perhaps the brothers themselves were expecting a different headline.

When Jesus healed ten lepers, I suspect he was expecting a different headline too.

Pastor John Strelan

If you’ve travelled along South Road recently you’d have seen that the T2D project is well underway. According to the promotional material, ‘drivers will be able to bypass 21 sets of traffic lights between the River Torrens and Darlington as they travel through two separate tunnels, connected by an open motorway’ saving up to 40 minutes in travel time! That’s the clincher isn’t it? We’ll be able to get to wherever we’re going quicker! Which, it seems, is what life is about these days. Quicker. Immediately. Instantly.

A 2015 Time Magazine article infamously reported that people now have shorter attention spans than goldfish*! (Are you still with me?)

So, perhaps we can relate to Habakkuk’s four-word cry: “How long, O Lord?” (even if it’s probably expecting too much to ask you to read the other 1384 words attributed to him).

It’s not just a lament for us in our instant-gratification world, but a challenge. Especially since God seems to run by his own schedule.

But, now that we’ll have an extra 40 minutes because of the T2D project you might spend 5 minutes of that time reading those other 1384 words.

Pastor John Strelan

* In case you were wondering, according to the article, goldfish have an attention span of 9 seconds.