The Will of God for Butterflies

It is impossible for God to do His will your way.

Instant gratification is our Achilles heel. We do not appreciate detail. We fail to see God in the little things. We want God to hurry, grant it now, and finish the job. It drives us crazy that God meanders.

The will of God is full of little things. All we see is the final outcome. God sent His Son into the world to save sinners. We see the final image of the Son of God on a cross, dying for sin only to rise from the dead three days later. But sending your Son into the world is complicated business, full of little things. Like days; while on Earth Jesus experienced approximately 12,045 of them. He needed all of them in order to die on one of them. Every day was a little thing that led to that one meaningful moment.

God created the heavens and the earth. God also created the little things, like paramecium and hydrogen atoms. God created the seas, and every molecule of water within them. The will of God is a big thing full of little things.

Little things make a big difference. In 1961 mathematician and meteorologist Edward Lorenz used a computer to recalculate a weather prediction. Instead of entering the number .506127 into the calculation Lorenz took a shortcut and entered only .506. The result radically changed the previous weather prediction. In a paper later published in 1963 on chaos theory, Lorenz surmised that the missing digits added up to the airflow caused by the flapping of a butterfly’s wing. This idea, that something so small could change something as large as a weather pattern has become known as the “butterfly effect.”

If God did His will our way there would be too many missing details in between. These are all details He governs, He loves, He created. Every detail glorifies Him; even butterflies. Butterflies are obviously an important detail in creating the heavens and the earth. Who would have thought?

It is impossible for God to do His will your way. We fail to see a need for the little things and all the meandering. We would blow it if we controlled the will of God. We would have no idea of what to do with all the butterflies.