July 8 – “White butterflies”

It took literally all day today, but I finished backing up the pictures on our old computer.  The stack of cd's is three and a half inches tall.  Now I get to find some place to store them.  I'm thinking in the closet with the twenty or thirty volumes of pictures from years past.   We made the required WalMart run for camp stuff.  It hit us that we needed things like sleeping bags.  We had eight or nine of those before Ike.  And a second travel alarm clock.  Chris has one, but I can't hear it when it goes off anyway, so I got a miniature atomic clock.  I still had to set it when I put the battery in.  I guess it couldn't hear the radio.  We looked for one of those BopIt games.  We have a little one, but those big giant one were a lot of fun on youth trips.  I don't think they make them anymore.  I was also saddened to remember that I no longer have a fanny pack.  I used to have one that I bought the year we went to Disneyland on a youth choir tour when we lived in Denver.  It had Mickey Mouse on it, so Mickey came with us every year to camp.  I did find a bag that looks like a shaving kit that I can hook onto my belt.  It's even big enough to hold a water bottle.  In fact, it came with two little tiny ones hooked inside.    The kids at church tonight were really excited about camp.  A group of girls stayed for about an hour and talked.  And talked.  And talked.  I was the only guy there.  Josh finally called sometime after nine, so I used that as an excuse to "recommend" leaving.  Chris called him back when we got home.  His big news was that he had blood work drawn and didn't pass out.  Until he got into the hall.    I had a deep philosophical moment today.  It occurred to me that we are finally seeing more and more wildlife.  With all the trees dying and being cut down, there just hasn't been any place for them to go.  The one species that stands out to me has been butterflies.  In the past (OK, pre-Ike), we had all shapes, sizes, and especially colors of butterflies around here.  They liked the flowers we had growing on our fence line.  Well, the butterflies are back.  They are all over Galveston, in fact.  But they are white.  White butterflies.  And when we got home tonight Chris even found a white, one-legged grasshopper on the wall inside the house.  Now I'm sure there is some high-scientific sounding reason behind it.  But I have not seen a single butterfly that was not white since the storm.  And after the grasshopper, I'm beginning to think maybe God has a message in all this.  White is the color of purity.  Maybe he's saying that Galveston has been somehow purified by the flood.  We sure needed it.  White is the color of angels.  Maybe the message is that he still cares.  He hasn't given up on the city.  Maybe I'm supposed to understand that there is often greater beauty in the simplest of things.  Maybe since white is technically the absence of color, we are to look for the good in our absence of "things."    Isaiah 1:18 says, "'Come now, let us reason together,' says the Lord.  'Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red as crimson, they shall be like wool.'"   Father, thanks for those white butterflies.  Whatever they mean, they are pretty and … alive.  Amen.