Winston had just hatched from his egg—a new hairy caterpillar born into a hairy new world. But Winston was smart. He would survive. No, he would thrive. Winston had a voracious appetite and grew quickly.

Once in a while Winston would cease his incessant munching to look around. Above the bush on which he lived was a wide blue sky, below only dirt. He had no idea where he had come from. He supposed he had just happened by chance. Or perhaps he had created himself.

Sometimes he thought he saw shadowy figures flitting about, but he dismissed them as figments of his imagination. They clearly didn’t belong to his bush-bound world.

Then one day one of those shadowy figures alighted next to him. A startled Winston looked up from his munching. “Who are you?” he blurted out.

“Don’t you recognize your own kind? I’m a butterfly. So will you be one day. You will leave your little bush behind, glide on the wind, and see the world as it really is.”

“Me? A butterfly? Nah,” Winston protested. “I’m a caterpillar. Period. Now if you will excuse me…”

“It works like this,” the butterfly patiently tried to explain. “First you spin a cocoon around yourself. Then you go to sleep for a few weeks. Then you wake up feeling tingly all over. That’s the juices flowing into the wings you grew while you slept. You wiggle your feet and discover that instead of the dozens you had before, you’re down to six—but they’re way longer! Then you start to feel claustrophobic in your cocoon—really claustrophobic—so you push your way out of it. You check out your new self, flap your wings a few times, and soon you are airborne.”

“Nonsense!” Winston retorted. “Do you take me for an idiot? I’m a caterpillar!”

The butterfly tried every form of reason and persuasion, but eventually gave up. “Have it your way,” he said sadly as he took flight.
In the days that followed, whenever Winston remembered the butterfly, he would smirk and say even more confidently than the time before, “Nonsense!!”

Then one day Winston thought he heard a whisper. “Spin a cocoon.” The voice was coming from inside, but it wasn’t his. This is crazy! he thought. And he shrugged it off.

And that brings us to the sad end of our story. Winter came, the leaves that Winston loved so much withered and died and fluttered to the ground, and soon poor Winston joined them.

Does any of this sound familiar? Some people are like Winston—so dead sure that their perception of life is all there is that they miss the real thing.

Curtis Peter Van Gorder is a full-time volunteer with the Family International in the Mideast.