< flashback friday: in the garden >

I have about 4 memory cards that I'm swapping around in my camera... all at various stages of 'fullness'. I'm slowly but surely offloading the images onto my hard drive, and I am quite amused at how old some of these really are. I have decided that I would like to try to showcase some of these and other forgotten photos on the blog each Friday - hence the name "flashback friday". Note that the key word in that statement is try. =)

Today we're traveling back to September 21, 2009,  a significant day in Marler family history - more on that later.  We made a major discovery in our garden. 

Caterpillars. Eastern Black Swallowtails, to be exact. You may remember our original caterpillar pal, Nashville... he was the same species of caterpillar/butterfly. Our buddies Noah & Sydney had been finding caterpillars left and right at their house during the summer. We had a couple of Monarchs and Swallowtails here and there, but nothing like the harvest they were experiencing. For days before this, I would go out to check... nothing. I decided to go out and look in the parsley just. one. more. time. to see if there was any end-of-season activity.

Lo and behold, I found some! Not just one or two... but 8! And the cool thing was that they were in various stages of development; something we hadn't really seen with our own eyes before. My best guess is that this black one is a 3rd instar caterpillar...

... and that the white one is a 4th instar, and the green one is a 5th instar.

I ran into the house to get my camera and call for the boys. We enjoyed watching the caterpillars eat... and eat... and eat... and, well, you all know how the story goes. =)  They were going to town on our parsley....  stripping the stalks in record time. If we hadn't planted it specifically for the purpose of being a host plant for these caterpillars, we probably would have been upset at the damage they were inflicting on our parsley.

I remember the events of 9/21/09 all too well. It was the day that changed life as we knew it. The day that catapulted us out of Murfreesboro... one of, what I would consider to be, the worst days of my life.

In rediscovering these images tonight, a couple of things come to mind:

• God knew that we needed an ordinary miracle in our garden that night. We needed something to relieve our mind of the doubts, the hurts and the fears... if only for a few moments.

• God can take what it is that ravages us... the things that strip our security, our peace, our pride... and transform them into something beautiful. Something amazing. As with the metamorphosis of a caterpillar, it is a process that cannot be fully explained or timed with exacting precision. I'm not sure if he changes the circumstances, or if it's that he uses them to transform us.

And we know that in all things 

God works for the good of those who love him, 

who have been called according to his purpose.

~ Romans 8:28