Smile!

How to Live More Calmly

You're a Lobster!

Did you know that lobsters never stop growing?

The largest one on record was 50 years old and weighed 45 lbs.

This is all the more remarkable knowing that lobsters outgrow their shells every couple months. And growing a new shell is a painful and painstaking process.

When a lobster grows too big for his shell, he swallows large amounts of water in order to crack the shell from the inside, he then expels the water and begins to wiggle out of his old shell, even closing his eyes for long periods of time while the shell around his head is removed.

Once a lobster is free from his shell, he just sort of wiggles around, vulnerable, exposed to predators, all the while waiting for the new shell to harden.

St Paul writes,  So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!" This makes the lobster the most Christian member of the animal kingdom.

However, St Paul did not write this passage for lobsters, he wrote it to remind us that God is doing something new in all of us.

Our lives are a series of growing shells that eventually become too small. Friends can come and go. Mentors can come and go. Homes, jobs, and relationships all have ways of no longer fitting, constricting us, and keeping us smaller than we really are.
How are we outgrowing our shells?

What is stirring in our spirits, waiting for bigger shells, bigger visions, to grow into?

What if we understood ourselves as ever-growing, ever-evolving, ever improving? What's keeping us from cracking our shells? How are we allowing the bigger, better, self inside of us to emerge, grow, and live?

Safety Third