If you’ve met me, you have more than likely seen me with a butterfly necklace on, or earings, or some other form of the winged creature (t-shirts, hair clips, sticky notes, stickers, etc). And you might be wondering why it is I wear them, since I generally don’t strike people as a particularly girly girl. It isn’t because they are ‘pretty’ or because they transform from the earth-bound caterpillar to a flying work of art. The answer: The Butterfly Effect.
If you want to know more about the origins of the term, you can click here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_effect) but here are the basics: A meteorologist in the 1960’s was performing an experiment and he rounded out his calculations from .506127 to just .506. His results were dramatically different than when he had first performed the test. This lead to the phrase: The flapping of a butterfly’s wings off the coast of Africa could cause a hurricane in the United States.
The Butterfly Effect is the premise that any change, any difference in this world, no matter how infinitesimally small, can have a dramatic effect on something seemingly unrelated to it.
Think about it. Something as small, as soft, as gentle as the flap of a butterfly’s wings. What difference can that make? It often seems like none at all. But what if that one tiny push of air was all that was needed to get a current moving. The possibilities are endless. There is power in the butterfly.
I see people as butterflies. When someone is having a rough day, it can take a single smile, or a hug, or just a simple ‘Hello’ to begin to turn their day around. That is the Butterfly Effect. When we do this deliberately, when we go out with the intention to change the world, sometimes we can be disappointed that we are not seeing instant results. Remember the Butterfly Effect. A whisper of love or a hug to a child in one village may be the edge a country needs to raise up Warriors for Christ in another. You never know how God is going to use His butterflies.
