Building Butterflies

A Reflection on the Psalm for Sunday, April 6th, 2025:
Fifth Sunday of Lent

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Psalm 126

​R. The Lord has done great things for us; we are filled with joy.

When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion, we were like those who dream. Then our mouth was filled with laughter, and our tongue with shouts of joy.

R. The Lord has done great things for us; we are filled with joy.

Then it was said among the nations, “The Lord has done great things for them.” The Lord has done great things for us, and we rejoiced.

R. The Lord has done great things for us; we are filled with joy.

Restore our fortunes, O Lord, like the watercourses in the desert of the Negev. May those who sow in tears reap with shouts of joy.

R. The Lord has done great things for us; we are filled with joy.

Those who go out weeping, bearing the seed for sowing, shall come home with shouts of joy, carrying their sheaves.

​R. The Lord has done great things for us; we are filled with joy.

Pause. Pray. Reflect.

For me, walking leads to wondering. A recent wondering-walk left me with a quandary: if communion with God elicits many of the same physical sensations as human love, why does it not elicit butterflies? Butterflies are that fluttery feeling in the stomach – of excitement or anticipation of the presence of the other, of newness and the unknown. Though it is a good feeling, an exciting feeling, it isn’t one I would liken to my experience of God’s love nor my experience of joy. 

Psalm 126 praises God for the good things He has done for us and the joy left in His wake. “[W]e were like those who dream,” it says. Though I have never dreamed so beautiful a love as the one He has offered me, He has never given me the butterfly flutters.

I attempted to follow this thought all the way through, while considering the words of the Psalm when it speaks of the restoration of fortunes. If my conception, my birth, was the original fortune He offered to me – this gift of life – it was in the moment when I realized I was meant to return this gift to Him that my fortunes were restored. The great wealth of the love of the Father in all things – my hardships, my joys, my challenges, my talents – is a gift rendered incomplete until I place it back in His hands. Aptly exemplified in this season, as the last of the snow and ice slip away, they reveal the brown and grey sludge underfoot. That sopping mess will facilitate the revelation of the life that works hard to emerge from the darkness beneath it. The hard winter ground, when warmed and nourished, gives way to a soft passage for life to spring forth. Just as hard, long-suffering hearts, when warmed and nourished by their Creator’s love, allows passage to the same – new life. 

Over
And over 
And over again.

He is always doing a new thing. So, He, our love, is our hope, our joy. Hope personified yields hope actualized. And the personification of God in Jesus has made Him known to us.

God is known. 

He’s a part of us and we are a part of Him. We are an artwork of His making. There’s an unexpected familiarity in our encounters with Him – even if the means by which He reveals Himself to us is very foreign. God’s love elicits not the feeling of butterflies, but the essence of their very experience. It is only His love that can set in motion a true metamorphosis of our core essence, our souls. 

My prayer for you today, my sisters, is that your transformation and joy might be complete as you continue on this path of faith, that you might seek out the restoration of our loving God until your innermost being floats as freely as a butterfly in the springtime breeze. 

​
Lori MacDonald

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