The Pain of Refining

This is something that my college pastor touched on at our bible study, and I started writing my thoughts about it down in my own words, really making it personal, so I thought I would share with y’all what I wrote

I started as a lump of raw material, something unusable and in desparate need of work. My heart’s desire is not to stay this useless piece of rock, but to become something beautiful and useful in God’s eyes. SOmething that God will smile at because he will be proud of his work. But this desire comes at a cost and sometimes I don’t know how great that cost really is. I ask God to work in my life, but then I am not comfortable with the areas of my life he wants to work on. I ask him to turn the fire up and then realize how hot God really wants the fire to be in order to remove the impurities from my life. And when I think that the fire couldn’t get any hotter and I can’t bear the pain any longer God turns it up just a little more, right to my breaking point. But thorughout it, the only promise I can hold ontois that God will not put me through a trial without giving me the strength to endre it. He believes in me, why shouldn’t I believe in myself? The God of the universe knows that I can make it through! Why should I have any doubt in myself? I have my creator giving me exactly the strength I need to go through each test.

What I find most difficult to understand is what God uses to refine me and bring me closer to him. Time and time again He has used the lives of those close to me to teach me something. Whether he completely strips them from my life or some other way, it is a difficult lesson to learn. The most painful though is when I am shown something in another person’s life, be it a relationship, success, you name it, and I think I want ti. It is only when I become aware of my coveting spirit that I realize that I don’t have X,Y, or Z because God doesn’t want me to have it right now. I won’t be able to to growo with that in my life and I will become stagnent. It is only after I realize all of this that God is able to work in my life and produce something positive from that test.

I think that God is continuously testing us, continuously turning up the heat. Sometimes however, there are times when the testing and the fire seem so much more present. For me, now is one of those times. I have never felt so strongly the constant struggles that I come in contact with and more than once I have wanted to buckle under the pressure and shy away from the intense heat searing through my worldly thoughts, killing away all that dead flesh. So many times I’ve wanted to hold onto the impurities that the fire is trying float to the top so God can clear them away. I hold onto the promise that God knows what he wants from me, and I am simply his workmanship, his creation. He has a design in mind that is more radical than I can even imagine and I know one day that I will be his completed project, a true miracle of God’s design. Because of that, I don’t want to fight the fire or push away from the pressure that God is placing in my life in order to shape me and purify me into what he wants

~ by Brianna - Coffee, Books and Bullet Journals on April 3, 2009.