I love this poem.

Flying Crooked

The butterfly, a cabbage white,

(His honest idiocy of flight)

Will never now, it is too late,

Master the art of flying straight,

Yet has – who knows so well as I?-

A just sense of how not to fly:

He lurches here and here by guess

And God and hope and hopelessness.

Even the acrobatic swift

Has not his flying-crooked gift.

                                Robert Graves

Most of us, from time to time, wish that we were smarter, more athletic, more musical, more good looking, more gregarious, more socially refined, more… than what we are by design. But, as the saying goes, ‘God don’t make no junk’. He knew exactly what he was doing when he made you just the way you are. 

I think God made all of us like butterflies – flying crooked. Most of the time we don’t notice our beautiful wings, the glorious details on our legs and antennae, the miracle of new birth as we leave our chrysalis behind. Sometimes all we notice is that we fly crooked – and we don’t like it.

But God made us just right for his eternal purposes. Truth be told, his glory usually shines with greater clarity in, through, and out of our various weaknesses and oddities.

The Lord told Paul, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness. Therefore’, says Paul, ‘I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me’ (2 Cor 12:9). It’s the flying-crooked gift.