‘Fire tests the purity of silver and gold, but the Lord tests the heart’
Proverbs 17:3
It’s not a question of if, but when, trials come along in life… and of how we handle them when they do.
And frankly, I have not always handled seasons of difficulty especially well. I am often too quick to react in anger, and also too quick to question God.
When I first left my role on the national fusion student movement leadership team because my church leaders was moving in a new direction, for a while I felt a little bit floored. All my plans, hopes and dreams had suddenly been shattered, and the future now stood ahead of me like a big unknown.
Unable to get my first break into the career in marketing which I’d studied at Uni for, I ended up taking a couple of pretty soul-destroying temporary jobs doing data entry and admin to pay my bills.
My over-riding memory of this period is one of boredom, of disappointment, and of feeling pretty resentful about how far I suddenly was from what I wanted to be doing.
To say that the experience was humbling would be a huge understatement. I spent months wrestling with God in my heart over the situation, asking God why, fighting against the season I had found myself in, and generally feeling sorry for myself.
But the fact is that when I finally chose to surrender my will to God’s and to accept his sovereignty over my life, regardless of how I felt about it, everything changed pretty fast. When I finally chose simply to trust God and to say ‘whatever happens in my life, you are God and I am not’… the breakthrough came.
I spent the best part of a full year temping in jobs I hated and every single day dragged.The benefit of hindsight is a wonderful thing, but I think that period of my life would have been a whole lot shorter and easier if I had spent a bit less energy resisting the season I found myself in, and a bit more saying ‘What is this about God? What do you want to teach or show me?’
What I learned through this season is that whenever I choose to lay down my questions, my hurts, my rights and wrongs, and determine to simply trust in God, it paves the way for change.
Surrendering to God always paves the way for change to happen in our lives; first in our hearts, and then in our circumstances.
In the midst of trials and testing we always have two choices; do we allow God to work in us in the midst of difficulty, or do we harden our heart against God or towards others?
Metal can only be refined and reshaped into something more pure and more useful under intense heat and pressure, and so it with us too.
But when you know that God is fully trustworthy, surrendering to His work in our lives is actually the only thing that makes any sense.
So today… I am reflecting on His sovereignty over my life and surrendering my heart afresh.
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