Refining

So I don't know if I've made clear how challenging I've found the, well, challenges that I've spoken about before. This has been a real testing time for me and to be honest I've found it really hard. I still do. The more and more I look to meet these challenges, these things I know are right, the harder I realise that it is.

I have been really feeling the weight of these challenges and so really thinking about how much easier giving it all up is. I mean, I don't want to give it up, I want to strive on, but I do want to, because it would be so much easier (plus I'd get to go and do things my own morals restrict me from at the moment). This pressure to give up and leave it all is definitely mounting (prayer please). Some comfort I had today though was when I realised what that might imply.

For one thing it spoke to me of how when we start doing important things and really going for God and His Kingdom, Satan starts hounding us and making things very difficult and painful. So, since I feel somewhat hounded by all this and I'm finding it difficult, I draw encouragement from the fact that this shows how Satan is fighting against me. If he's doing that then I'm on to something good. Something big, something important, and something threatening to the kingdom of darkness. I must press on, I must overcome darkness with light.

The other thing I remembered was about refining fire. To purify gold takes a very hot fire and the removal of wrong things. I feel that my understanding and attitudes are being challenged. Tested by fire so to speak. And whilst this is difficult and in a sense painful, the fact, again, that it is happening suggests to me that good change is going on inside me. In which case bring it on. Hurt me more. Turn up the heat and get rid from me everything that is wrong. Purify me so that Your reflection can be seen in me.

Finally, I drew encouragement from a simple illustration I just experienced. I have been feeling that whilst all of this good change is starting to come about in me, the more I see things as how they could and should be, the more I see how very very very far from that they are. This seems so discouraging because the more I feel that I am being changed in these, I am convinced, incredibly good ways, the further I feel from being like the average Joe out there who doesn't know God. How am I supposed to connect with the next person on the street, let alone help them move from the understanding the kingdom of darkness would keep them in to that of God's kingdom?

I don't know the answer to that question and it would seem that the more I grow in these ways the further every one else seems and so much more insurmountable the task of helping them move appears. I really don't know what I am supposed to do. But I was encouraged because as I passed a body of water and gazed at the stillness of it, I felt compelled drop a stone into it. As I did so I watched the ripples move outward until the whole body of water was affected.

Now, although I don't know at all how to change the world or help others come to Jesus, I am convinced that as I seek God's refining in me, the changes He makes can have an affect that will ripple out to potentially everyone I encounter and more. I pray that God would raise up a generation who would go all out for God, counting the cost but reaping the reward for Him.