The Monarch's Last Crawl

Every September, researchers at the University of Kansas tag thousands of monarch butterflies migrating through the Great Plains. Dr. Orley "Chip" Taylor has led this effort since 1992, and he never tires of one particular fact: inside the chrysalis, the caterpillar doesn't simply sprout wings. It dissolves. Nearly every cell breaks down into a biological soup — an unrecognizable mess of proteins and lipid chains. If you cracked open the chrysalis on day five, you would find nothing that resembles either a caterpillar or a butterfly. You would find something that looks like death.

Yet folded into that apparent destruction are tiny clusters of cells called imaginal discs, dormant since the larva's birth, waiting for exactly this moment. From the wreckage, they build an entirely new creature — one that can fly two thousand miles from Kansas to the mountain forests of Michoacan, Mexico, navigating by the angle of the sun.

Paul knew nothing about imaginal discs, but he understood the principle perfectly. "What you sow does not come to life unless it dies," he told the Corinthians. The seed that falls into the ground must lose every recognizable feature of itself before the Almighty raises it into something beyond imagination — imperishable, glorious, powerful. Our resurrection is not a renovation of the old body. It is a new creation so radically different that flesh and blood cannot even contain it. The caterpillar cannot fly. But what God grows from its dissolution can.