Wednesday 7 November 2007

The Butterfly

A man found a cocoon of a butterfly. One day a small opening appeared. He sat and watched the butterfly for several hours as it struggled to force its body through that little hole. Then it seemed to stop making any progress. It appeared as if it had gotten as far as it could, and it could go no further.

So the man decided to help the butterfly. He took a pair of scissors and snipped off the remaining bit of the cocoon. The butterfly then emerged easily. But it had a swollen body and small, shriveled wings.

The man continued to watch the butterfly because he expected that, at any moment, the wings would enlarge and expand to be able to support the body, which would contract in time.

Neither happened! In fact, the butterfly spent the rest of its life crawling around with a swollen body and shriveled wings. It never was able to fly.

What the man, in his kindness and haste, did not understand was that the restricting cocoon and the struggle required for the butterfly to get through the tiny opening were God's way of forcing fluid from the body of the butterfly into its wings so that it would be ready for flight once it achieved its freedom from the cocoon.

Sometimes struggles are exactly what we need in our lives. If God allowed us to go through our lives without any obstacles, it would cripple us.

We would not be as strong as what we could have been. We could never fly!

Author Unknown

4 comments:

Saira Andleeb said...

This is why i say that pain is one of the biggest blessings of god.
No pain, No gain !

:)

teeB@ said...

This is an anecdote which we are hearing since our childhood but we hav never understood its meaning...!!!

But in a way i do not agree to it...this story is related to nature... in real lyf no one is there to help neither the people nor the animals.apart from this wen Allah wants his mankind to be in difficult tyms...no matter wat happens still they never get relief from the hardships until the written time period is over. N if we ever get any help, i dont think it makes person suffer in future...but those helps turn out to be relations in future.

Anonymous said...

teeba dear, there is someone always there to help, sometimes visible sometimes not. Survival without aide is not possible, and even though one should be given proper space to grow, moral help is always necessary.

Human is a social animal we need emotional space too.

Lovely anecdote syra !!

bilal said...

struggle: "an energetic attempt to achieve something"

there is no shrotcut to it, no shortcut to experience, no shortcut to hardwork...

as was said b4, no pain, no gain!