The Refining Fire When I was conceived, I was pure. The only relationship I had ever had was with my creator. However, as soon as I was conceived, the enemy began testing to see where I was sensitive to his tactics. His purpose was to make me aware of the sensitivities God gave me, because those sensitivities help me discern my purpose. The goal of this enemy was, and is, to discourage me from fulfilling that purpose. When the man who sired me found out I existed, he re-acted in a way that caused me to go through the following process: I identified the object of his emotional re-action with “it’s me.” I identified the subject of his emotional re-action with “I’m the failure.” I identified the verb of his emotional re-action with “He doesn’t want me to exist.” Then I began re-acting emotionally myself and took the following conclusions into my heart: “I shouldn’t exist because of ‘me’” and “I don’t want ‘me’ to exist.’ Because of the emotional investment he made trying to figure out how to have me aborted, I ended up believing I should not exist, and this belief infected everything I did for almost forty-six years. This was just the first time I disagreed with God, but it was one of the most powerful. Others included taking on a fear of death when my mom was going into labor with me and I perceived her emotional response to my dad’s driving, taking the emotional conclusion that “I don’t want to die” into my heart. By the time I was born, I did not want to exist, but did not want to die, so I am not surprised that I have been emotionally conflicted throughout most of my life. Consider a gold brick for a moment… People do not find Gold in brick form in nature. People often find gold in nugget, dust, or other forms, but not brick. Historically, many people have found gold and put it in a container of some type to keep from losing it, and to move it from place to place. Others have heated it in order to melt it and make it into something more easily managed and moved. However, over time, people began to learn that the more heat you applied, and the more impurities you removed, the more gold lost some of the desirable qualities for the shapes it was being made into. For instance, we do not make gold wedding rings out of pure gold because the gold would be too soft to keep its shape. Most wedding rings are made out of 12-14 carat gold, where a carat is equal to 4% purity. This means a 12 carat gold ring is only 48% gold and a 14 carat gold ring is only 56% gold. The rest of the metal in the ring is there to harden and otherwise cause the gold to be more resilient and wearable. Pure gold would change shape with body heat, absorb into the skin more easily, and wear much more quickly, which means it would not last a lifetime as the ring is supposed to signify. By the time I was six years old, I knew something was wrong and, being raised in churches, I decided I wanted to be part of the family of Christ. The response I received to my statements of interest was uniform rejection. I say this because my parents took me to four different churches in three denominations during the period when I was “too young to understand what it means.” What they really meant was that I was too young to buy into their indoctrination programs. Today, I realize the people in those churches, if they were consistent in their behavior, would not allow anyone under the age of 13 to be adopted into any family for any reason. This is because they believe the child would not be able to understand what it meant to be adopted, just as I supposedly could not understand what it meant to be adopted into the Body of Christ. During the seven years when I was rejected by the church (which is not the same as the Body of Christ), the only source of acceptance I could count on was the enemy of my soul. I did not realize what his goal was, even though scriptures make that clear, but everyone else kept abdicating their positions of authority in my life to him, so I did not have a choice. When I was eight years old, I made a vow to “never have children” so I would not “be like my dad.” In the same incident, I told the man who sired me that I hated him. He ignored me and my mom told me it was not true, but neither invested time in me to help me figure out what I was feeling. It was more than thirty years before God took me back and showed me how I had disagreed with Him. One morning, during my quiet time with Him, He showed me the memory I had repressed (and He was sneaky about it, too). A few days later, He reattached the emotions I had detached from in the event. Five different times, He took me back to that event, showing me different perspectives, and different wounds that needed healed, along with the coping mechanisms I took on to live with those wounds. In the end, He had me grieve this disagreement and, in the process, I realized I did not hate the man who sired me. I had simply been experiencing frustration, anger and fear at an intensity I had not experienced before and the enemy suggested it was hate. When I gave voice to the enemy’s suggestion, the disrespect and dismissal of my parents served as their abdication of authority in that area of my life, and the enemy who might have been lying, but at least was willing to acknowledge I had emotions and make a suggestion regarding what they were, gained that authority. By the time I was twenty-five, my life was so compartmentalized, and the god of the churches I grew up in was so irrelevant, I turned my back on him. Nine months later, the God who created me, who I wanted to be adopted by when I was six, called me to task. While the event was not quite the same as Paul’s confrontation on the road to Damascus, it was every bit as real, and every bit as effective. However, I had no idea what the ramifications of turning back would be. Over the fourteen years immediately following the confrontation, God systematically showed me that the church was not the Body of Christ, even though the Body of Christ might be part of some churches. One of the most amazing lessons was when I was asked to consider being an elder in a church, while I was trying to show God He could not “make me live.” My life was so compartmentalized, the people in the church thought I was Godly. What I know now is that the gold God created me to be was broken up into so many small pieces, these church people saw a nugget and thought it was worth their attention. After fourteen years of untraining, God led me to seminary, where I learned to grieve. Why this was a lesson I had to go to seminary to learn, I do not know. The scriptures make it clear that without grieving, we cannot be comforted by God, but people who claim to be “Christians” are frequently stifling the grieving spirit. It is interesting that I had to be dismissed from seminary before I learned that grieving is the most powerful method God utilizes to remove the dross from the gold that He created us to be. You see, at conception, God takes an amount of something with attributes similar to gold dust and invests it in our embryo. This dusty substance is our spirit, and it will live beyond this time zone, but what happens in this life is what forms it for the life to come. If you look very closely, you would find that the particles of dust are part of a six dimensional puzzle God alone knows how to assemble. However, most people do not look closely enough, or decide the fact they had a part in the formation of a body means they get to “make” the child fit their image of who they should be. As the child develops, God, the parents, other people, and the enemy are all working to form the dust into shapes they recognize. With some heat, nuggets form. With more heat, larger nuggets. However, since God is the only one who knows where what fits, others introduce impurities like doctrines and teachings the child does not need to fulfill their purpose in God’s creation. When people are discerning and respectful of God’s creation, recognizing that God created the child to be a blessing, they cooperate with God in the process of assembling the six dimensional “jigsaw” puzzle (creative, spiritual, rational, physical, emotional, and relational). Others remove, misplace, or pollute the puzzle with their own ideas of how the child should be made. At some point, the child becomes responsible for the decisions they make. While God does not hold them accountable for what happened before they reach this point, He does hold them accountable for what happens afterward. If they choose to keep following in the footsteps of the people who raised them, ignoring God’s tugs to get them off those paths onto the path He created them to walk, they will answer for their stubbornness. If they choose to leave the paths they were taught to walk as children, and follow the path God created them for, they will experience many things no one else has experienced, recognize that their perspective is unique, and uniquely valuable, and find fulfillment they would never have dreamed of otherwise. The key question is, how refined do you want to be? Are you content to be a 1 carat image of God, who ignores God or is openly hostile to Him, yet still honors Him with their creativity and other gifts? Are you content being the 5 carat image of God who knows there is a god out there somewhere who deserves to be honored, but doesn’t know or care where, or who? Are you happy to be a 10 carat image of God who chooses a god to follow and honor, but lives a secular life with minimal “religious” activity? Are you proud to be a 15 carat image of God, who recognizes the God who created you in His image is worthy of your time, so you become religious, but still have hard spots of stubbornness and allow others to maintain the impurities you have become comfortable with? Are you pleased to be a 20 carat image of God, yet afraid to go further because you are afraid you will not be acceptable among those who are religious and proud, yet hard and judgmental, because are already beginning to be offended by your humble purity and the conviction God brings through you? Are you willing to be different enough to be recognized as the image of God because you live so much like Christ, people begin to ask questions about how you live, which lead to conversations where you introduce them to the person of Christ, who is present where two or more come together in His identity? Jesus, Peter, and John all taught that it is possible to become 25 carat images of God, in this life. Enoch and Elijah were so refined they did not have to die and leave their polluted bodies behind, when it came time to be with God. Refining is a painful process where the impurities have to be identified and removed, which often means grieving their loss, and the losses associated with them. The testing we experience in life is like the testing meter used to determine the quality of gold. It helps us see how pure we are, where, and in what ways. Some testing confirms healing and refinement has taken place. Some helps us see where more refining is necessary. However, as gold doesn’t know how pure it is, we cannot assume we know how pure we are. Out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks and, if you pay attention to what you feel, and what comes out of you when you are being tested (without censorship), you will be able to discern what God is working on at that moment. In some ways, His healing is like popping a zit. The earlier you pop it, the less painful. The later, the more painful, and the more puss comes out. Just as you do not judge the puss that comes out of a zit, but focus on getting it all out, you should not judge what comes out when you grieve, but make sure it all comes out. Shutting down in the midst of grief means it will take more time, and more pressure, to get it all out the next time God squeezes. As David wrote in Psalm 23, we must go through the valleys to experience God’s presence, and reach the other side, where He lifts us up. As Jesus affirmed in Matthew 5, those who grieve are blessed, for God will be their comforter. As James wrote in James 4, we should “be wretched and mourn” until God lifts us up. I know from experience that the enemy tries to discourage us from grieving (which is why every culture I know of has some stigma against grieving), but if we choose to trust God and grieve, he then tries to convince us the lions in the valley will kill us. All of this is because his goal is to keep us from being who God created us to be. He doesn’t care what it takes, as long as we allow him to influence us, he will show us where he has influence, and God calls us to confess, receive His forgiveness, and let Him cleans us of whatever contributes to our disagreeing with Him in the first place. Being refined means you become more and more pure, more and more content with who you are, because you are becoming the person God created you to be, and more and more impregnable to the impurities others try to get you to accept as belonging to you. Just because you will not accept their baggage, does not mean you do not care for them. The question is, do you want to lose your excess baggage and, once you have shed it, help others recognize, and do the same? A bar of gold does not show off, or draw attention to itself. It does not care where it is, or what is going on around it. It simply is what it is, where it is, in whatever shape it is. A person who is a 25 carat image of God does not care where they are, as long as they are where God put them. They do not care what is going on around them, but look for God’s perspective of the situation, and God’s purpose for placing them there. They do not care what the people around them look like, or do, but simply look for God’s perspective, and respond accordingly. They do not fear, judge, or otherwise try to figure out what others think about what is going on, but seek God’s perspective, and glowingly reflect Him even more brightly than the moon reflects light from the sun. The process is not pleasant, but the results are awesome.
Posted on: Mon, 01 Jul 2013 13:41:13 +0000
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