By Rae Lynn DeAngelis
I love orange juice, but like any drink connoisseur I’m particular about my beverage of choice; it must be 100% pure (not from concentrate) and pulp-free. (I’m guessing it’s a texture issue because I’m also not a fan of chunky peanut butter or yogurt with bits of fruit.)
I must admit that God gives me some of the strangest means of inspiration for writing. During my morning time with God, a spiritual growth book I had been reading talked about how God sometimes allows difficulties and even hardships into our lives so that He can stretch and strain our faith.
The word strain stood out to me and jolted my memory to childhood mornings of long ago. Before the days of pulp-free orange juice, I had to remove the annoying bits of orange with a kitchen strainer.
As the vision played out in my mind, I began to wonder about strained faith. What does it look like and are there any parallels. When God relates the physical world to something spiritual, I usually have deeper understanding of the concept He’s trying to teach.
Like many words in our English vocabulary the word strained has more than one meaning depending on context. For example, stained is defined as each of the following:
- Having been passed through a strainer
- Done with or marked by excessive effort; forced
- Extended beyond proper limits
- Antagonized to the verge of open conflict
- Twisted; wrenched
I don’t know about you, but I’m getting a mental picture of strained faith by definition alone.
The past couple of weeks I have felt extended beyond proper limits. It seems that every area of my life is marked by excessive effort. I’m not going to lie. I sometimes find myself growing weary.
Although I rarely appreciate the benefits of trying circumstances in the moment, I can often look back and see how God used my hard times to unearth character deficiencies in my heart. Pride, anger, selfishness, and impatience usually make an appearance in unexpected ways and I realize I’m not as far along this spiritual journey as I had hoped.
Stressful jobs, challenging relationships, troublesome finances, and failing health have a way of unveiling the ugly in us.
Like a goldsmith who purifies precious metals over a controlled fire, God uses circumstances such as these to turn up the heat so that the impurities buried deep within rise to the surface where they can be revealed. If we surrender our lives to the refining work of God, He uses these opportunities to filter-out things in our character that are not of Him.
The next time you feel extended beyond your limit, antagonized to the verge of conflict, or marked by excessive effort remember this… Slowly but surely, you and I are becoming a clearer reflection of the One whose image we bear—Jesus.
“In all this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. These have come so that the proven genuineness of your faith—of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire—may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed.” (1 Peter 1:6-7)
