Issue #3 (Josh's Life as a Bloated Moth)

Wow... This post needs a lot of explaining!

A few months ago my mom and I were talking on the phone.
It was a normal conversation between us, mom telling me the latest depressing story she heard and then likening it to my family.

The story was from a talk she heard at her stake conference.

There was a boy who collected and raised moths.

(This, by the way, is a sick hobby, all the moth fuzz... yuck!)

Anyway he was waiting for his latest generation of baby moths to hatch,
and while watching the cocoons one day he noticed one had a hole in it and was wiggling and shaking all around, so he thought for sure this one was getting ready to hatch.
So the boy watched it for a while and it seemed to him like the baby moth wasn't going to be able to make it out of the cocoon on its own.
So he decided that he was going to help it, by peeling away the cocoon shell, from the hole.
When he opened it, he found a moth with a bloated abdomen and small, deformed wings.
A few minutes later the poor deformed moth died a cruel and untimely death.
It was all because that foolish boy decided to help it.
The boy later found out that before the moths can break out of their cocoons, they flap their little wings around to push the growth hormone from their abdomen into their wings to help them grow.
If the boy would have been patient and let the moth figure it out
on its own then it would have lived.

My mother's moral to the story was that I am the foolish boy who helped the moth get out of its cocoon before it was ready and unfortunately Josh is the bloated moth in the story.
My mom said that I tend to baby Josh too much
and cushion him from the unkindly blows of the world and by doing so
I make him have a bloated moth-like abdomen with little underdeveloped wings.
If I wouldn't do so much to make Josh's life easy, and let him struggle through his obstacles on his own, then maybe he could grow into a beautiful moth with large, fuzz covered, wings.

Thank you mom for the beautiful analogy,
I hope for nothing more than to help Josh reach his truest potential...

a moth with normal sized wings and a proportional abdomen.
We love you Mom! :)