Like Silver

Flicks of orange and red danced behind my eyelids. The wind rushed around me, bringing a rush of heat to my face. But the heat got stronger as the wind gained speed. My heart felt as if is trying to escape from my chest it was beating so fast.

My eyes snapped open. Tongues of fire raged around me, burning every part of me they touch. Every nerve in my body screamed with pain.

“Father! Get me out of here!” I screamed. The sound of my own voice was drowned against the noise of the fire.  I felt small and alone.

At first there was silence. But I felt a familiar voice say deep into my soul, “Be still, my child. The pain will be worth it in the end. I am refining you.”

I always thought I had a heart of “pure gold.” Life always seemed to go right as I planned. But the past year has been one full of disappointments, death and heartbreak.

You see, I never really had a reason to doubt God. But the very moment I was tossed into these situations, my faith faltered and swayed. Questions like, “Why me?”, “What did I do wrong?”.

I spent late nights weeping (No not crying. Crying is soft, with little tears. Weeping wrenches your whole body into exhaustion) over things I have lost, plans gone wrong.

One late teary night, I called up a dear friend for guidance and encouragement.

She spoke 1 Peter over me:

“In this you rejoice, though now for a little while, if necessary, you have been grieved by various trials, so that the tested genuiness of your faith – more precious than gold that perishes thought it is tested by fire – may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ..”

Ok, so my trials are a bit different than what Peter went through, but they are trials nonetheless.

But as she spoke this scripture to me, I felt the Holy Spirit tugging at my heart at the phrase “ tested by fire”.  Being ignorant, I put the phrase away in the back of my mind for a later date.

But God has a funny way of speaking to you through your friends.

I drove down to College Station to visit my best friend and her husband, a great place to get away from it all. We had just cooked an amazing meal of spaghetti and artichokes and her husband prayed over the food, but the prayer was more over me.

He prayed that I would treasure this time of refinement. That I would come out a whole new person with a faith on fire.

That was like a 2X4 to my head. God obviously was trying to teach me that He was refining me through all of this. The next day I began my study of refinement. I guess these are those findings/reflections.

Refine: 1. To reduce to a pure state

2. to free from moral perfection

3.to improve by pruning or polishing

4. to free from what is coarse, vulgar or uncouth

I scoured the internet for terms, and even tried to do research on the actual refining process. I came up with nothing.

All that I know is fine metals aren’t always pure. They have flecks of imperfections in them and the only way to get them out is to place them into a ridiculously hot fire. The only thing that is able to survive this fire are the most pure parts of the metals.

I searched for all the times the word “refined” was used in the Bible and came up with A LOT. But I read everyone of them.

For example, Pslams 66:10, God allows the Israelites to be “crushed” by a burden, to be overcome by a foreign enemy. They went through “fire and water”. But God didn’t simply refine them and bring them out. He brought them to a place of abundance, a place full of blessing. God heard their prayer and responded.

Isaiah 48:10, talks about how God tries in the fire/furnace of affliction for HIS glory.  Again in Isaiah 1:25, He smelts away the impurities and then RESTORES us.

A lot of the verses had the similar message, God allows this stuff to happen, molds us, takes out the sin, the shame, those little thoughts and habits we have that aren’t pure, and then polishes us, restores us for HIS glory.

But I never realized I was in the fire in the first place. I was so wrapped up in the pain and the hurt to realize the end result of God’s glory in all of what was happening.

A lot of my prayers in those first few weeks where, “God, get me out of this fire. Please.”

But now I realize that he doing a work in me. Refining isn’t a fuzzy, feel good, happy process. It’s burning, melting the imperfections slowly.

So now, rather than praying for the fire to go away, I simply pray for God’s hand to squeeze during it all. Because after this is all done, I will shine like silver.