Let me begin with this historical note from Garrison Keillor’s daily “Writer’s Almanac” for today, January 2:

“Today is an important anniversary for lepidopterists — people who study, collect, or observe butterflies and moths. On this day in 1975, an amateur naturalist, Kenneth Brugger, discovered where monarch butterflies from North America spend the winter. Scientists had been studying monarch migration for more than 30 years, and they had found out almost everything about the butterflies, except where they spent their winters.

Kenneth Brugger was an American textile engineer living in Mexico City . He remembered driving through a storm of monarchs once on a vacation, in the mountains west of Mexico City . He went back there, but he couldn't find anything, and the local farmers wouldn't give him any information. Then he brought his Mexican wife Catalina, and the locals warmed up. A farmer led them up the side of a remote mountain, up to 10,000 feet, and suddenly the fir trees were so thick with butterflies that they looked orange instead of green. Scientists estimated that there were four million butterflies per acre. Brugger was elated, but he couldn't fully appreciate what he was seeing — he was colorblind.”

My observations, questions and possible lessons to be drawn:

§        Brugger was a textile engineer: this work no doubt paid for his well-being and that of his family. It was technical, scientific work for which he must have studied and labored to become qualified; but was it also his passion?

§        Brugger was an amateur naturalist; to do something avidly without pay suggests a passion. What is (what should be?) the relationship between one’s passion and one’s work?

§        The local farmers would not share what they knew about the butterflies with a foreigner: what did they fear might happen? What keeps us from sharing?

§        Brugger did not succeed alone; his wife was the key partner that opened the door to a partnership with the local farmers who proved essential to the discovery of the butterflies. Where are we forming key and extended partnerships for our efforts?

§        If understanding the natural world was such a passion for Brugger, and to some critical degree, color is a part of appreciating and understanding that world, AND if we assume that God gifts each one of us with the seeds of our passion, then why did God not also gift Brugger with color-sightedness? How are our limitations a part of our successes? What if “limitations” are “assets” we have not yet learned to appreciate and make use of?

What is your work? Your passion? Your partnerships? Your ‘limitations’? May the New Year be one of satisfying discovery and achievement, infused by God’s passion.