I love photography and over the years have taken many photographs, capturing all the usual suspects, family and friends, special occasions, wedding baptisms and so on.
But recently I was taken up by what I thought was a lovely butterfly. After photographing it and looking up its ID I was surprised to discover what I had captured was a Humming Bird Moth.
A first for me. This led me to taking a step out of the norm and going on a butterfly hunt. This is not as easy as you may think. You have to be quick on your toes; butterflies are easy to scare and flighty, photographing a butterfly on the move is really difficult.
There are so many types of butterflies in this country; and, I guess around the world many thousands.
This is the Brimstone:
There are many great names given to butterflies, Holly Blue, Red Admiral, Scotch Argus, Peacock, Camberwell Beauty. The Rosy Grizzled Skipper, Amanda’s Blue, Duke of Burgundy and Provence Hairstreak.
The Painted Lady, (not someone of the night) is a beautiful butterfly with great colouring and easy to identify. Going butterfly hunting often means wandering about in some place that has lots of thistles, blackberry bushes, blackthorn and nettles; and rarely on a lovely flat lawn, or just at hand on a rose bush.
It takes time and patience but the end result can be glorious.
O’ the hidden mystery of a chrysalis?
Stumbling across a chrysalis, unless you are an expert you will not know what will emerge, until it has emerged. It’s a bit like human beings, not sure what we may turn out like. We need time to emerge and become mature, to develop our character and personality; we need time to understand the nature of people and things around us.
Likewise we need to understand the relationship God wants to have with us. The dichotomy, between what can be described, as our old self and the new self. The bible talks about being born again, understanding that sin hold us back and distorts all things. Being born again is the promise of new life because of what Jesus did on the cross, taking our sin upon himself and freeing us to emerge with our characters being formed again, but this time in Jesus. The results can be glorious. Challenging but glorious. There may be the challenges of thistles and thorns, nettles and things that scratch and bite. We can emerge at any time in our lives even when we are really old, by becoming born again in Jesus.
Image credits: Erik Karits, Jeffrey Hamilton & Suzanne D Williams via Unsplash
