 Thursday, August 12, 2004
Butterfly Flap
Butterfly flap
Today at Hillsong Women the speaker used a little analogy which is quite interesting. I can't recall exactly how it went, but something like a flap of the butterfly wings can actually be the beginning of a hurricane down the track.
The topic is about "how to be extraordinary."
My understanding of this is extraordinary starts within ordinary. We're all given many opportunities within our capacities to "flap the butterfly wings", and if we're obedient to these opportunities, the small things in our hands can lead to something that's extraordinary later on.
This incidence came into my mind while I'm thinking about this, and please allow me to use it just as an example. Years ago while in China, I was working at a college. And one day at lunch time in the school canteen I saw a girl who's about 5 years younger than me. I felt a little nudge in my spirit to go and talk to her. I hardly knew this girl, only briefly met her once before. I hesitated for a while, then I decided to go and talk to her. It turned out that she was actually going to commit suicide after that lunch. We had a good talk for about 2-3 hours and she was saved at the end of the conversation. Later that evening she came to our meeting and was gloriously transformed. In her first year as a Christian, she brought over a hundred people to the Lord. After that we went to different meetings and gradually lost contact, but she has always been on fire for God. And as I was thinking about that butterfly flap, I was wondering, how many people would she bring to the Lord later on? And how many people got saved or influenced from that first 100 people...?Just say each one brought 10 people to the Lord(which is not hard in China), then it would be 1000, and then the thousand could turn into ten thousand, it's been over 10 years now, so it's not totally impossible... One day in eternity I might be able to count all the effect that started from obeying that little nudge. What if I didn't go and talk to her? What would be missing out in the whole picture?
We can have lots of little "nudges" in our daily life. They're all within our ordinary zone. If we obey these nudges, and give out what's in our hands, then these could all be turning points from ordinary to extradinary. Sometimes we can see the result, sometimes we can't, until we're in eternity. But if we submit our ordinaries to God, then He can make them into something that's extraordinary and beyond our wildest imaginations.
Update: This is how Phil explains about the butterfly effect:
"The "Butterfly Effect" is often ascribed to Lorenz. In a paper in 1963 given to the New York Academy of Sciences he remarks: One meteorologist remarked that if the theory were correct, one flap of a seagull's wings would be enough to alter the course of the weather forever. By the time of his talk at the December 1972 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C. the sea gull had evolved into the more poetic butterfly - the title of his talk was* : Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil set off a Tornado in Texas?"more info at http://www.cmp.caltech.edu/~mcc/chaos_new/Lorenz.html
As seen by
Susan @ 11:27 PM
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