Wired for the Journey

Every autumn, monarch butterflies undertake one of the most remarkable navigational feats in all of nature. From milkweed fields as far north as Canada, they travel up to 3,000 miles to a single cluster of Oyamel fir trees in the mountains of Michoacán, Mexico — a forest most of them have never seen.

What makes this staggering is that the butterflies making the journey are the great-great-grandchildren of the ones who left Mexico the previous spring. No monarch lives long enough to complete the round trip. Yet neurobiologist Steven Reppert at the University of Massachusetts discovered that monarchs carry a time-compensated sun compass in their antennae — a biological GPS calibrated to the angle of sunlight and the time of day — guiding them with stunning precision toward a destination written into their very design.

They do not need to understand the mechanism. They simply follow what they were made to carry.

There is something deeply freeing in that image. Trust is not the absence of uncertainty. It is the willingness to move according to the nature given to us by the One who made us. God, who wired a half-gram butterfly with navigational wisdom it cannot explain, has also placed within us His word, His Spirit, and His promises.

We may not see the forest ahead. But we were made by Someone who does. And sometimes, trusting Him means simply flying the direction we were designed to go.