The Courage Written in Paper-Thin Wings

Each autumn, monarch butterflies launch themselves on a journey that defies everything we know about caution. Weighing less than a paperclip, they fly up to three thousand miles from Canada to a specific grove of oyamel fir trees in central Mexico — a place they have never been.

Here is what makes this astonishing: the generation that makes the southward journey is the first of its lineage to attempt it. Their parents and grandparents lived and died in summer meadows farther north. No monarch taught them the route. Yet neuroscientist Steven Reppert at the University of Massachusetts discovered that monarchs carry a time-compensated sun compass in their antennae — a navigational system encoded in their very DNA by the Creator who designed them for the journey before they ever took flight.

They fly into headwinds. They cross open water over the Gulf of Mexico with no place to land. They press on through storms. And they arrive.

Courage is rarely the absence of vulnerability. The monarch is proof that the Most High writes daring into the most fragile things. God did not wait until the butterfly was stronger to give it the calling. He gave the calling and then built the compass.

When the Lord asks you to step into the unknown, remember: the One who calls you has already equipped you for the flight. You may feel as thin as a butterfly wing, but El Shaddai has written the map into your very being.