Caterpillar Caterpillar...where have you been?

Well,I finally told the kids that the caterpillar was dead. No one believed me. I explained to them what they looked like in Chloe's class room at school and it was very different. I explained to them how the one's at school, that seemed to be the same age as ours, were already butterflies that had been let go. I began to turn our container upside down to show them that the "coffin" was not doing anything. I expected it to fall.
Well to my surprise, when I began to turn it over I saw this small brown thing. It shocked me! Low and behold there was a small moth hanging upside down, fluttering its wings away! We all got a good look. And I might have been more excited then the kids! We took some pictures and let him go. He took a while to get going, but he is officially gone.
So, i can't help but think a little deeper about this. 1st, I thought he was dead... the reason I was sure the caterpillar was dead to begin with was because it wasn't moving. Well, I found out that was because he was about to enter a new amazing process. Isn't that just like us? Have you ever thought, wow...I am in a routine day to day rut. But then you turn the corner for some new adventure. Some welcomed, some not. 2nd, I saw him in the chrysalis and had hope. But when I saw the other chrysalis at school, it was nothing like ours. How superficial. When someone doesn't appear just as the majority, we often assume something is wrong with them. Could it just be, they are exactly how God intended? Unique and designed in a way to teach us something the majority can't? 3rd, when all that time went by and I didn't see anything, my assumption was, it failed. He never became anything. Everything takes time. Each bag of popcorn takes a different amount of seconds. Every baby takes a different amount of days to be ready to enter the world. Every person takes a different amount of time to become what they were intended to be! Time doesn't = failure... I think it usually = wisdom. And last, for all my mother's out there on mother's day. Mother's intuition. From the minute that my kids brought that crazy caterpillar to me, I told them I was pretty sure it looked like a moth caterpillar, not a butterfly. They didn't care and said it would still have wings and be pretty. Sure enough it was a moth. And sure enough they thought it was pretty. The eye of a child is something to be in awe of!