These words from Martha Zimmerman (of Having a Mary Heart in a Martha World) were a needed reminder this morning:
"The diamond ring I wear on my left hand didn't just happen. Before John and I picked it out of the jeweler's window, someone mounted it in a setting of gold. Before that, someone else saw promise in a lumpy, milky stone and chiseled facets to release the beauty locked inside. Before that, a worker found that rock deep inside a mountain. And multimillennia before that moment, a trillion pounds of rock, pressure, and steam worked together to compress ordinary carbon into a shape and substance we call a diamond.
It takes a process to get a product."
The same is true for us, as believers, as human beings. Let us rest in knowing that we are not being left alone to wander through this world. The craftsman hand of our Maker is close by, guiding and rebuking us into purity.
Several years ago, I worked at a little camp in the mountains of North Carolina. I learned from everyone and everything... jewelry class not excluded.
The metal working class was one of my wisest instructors. Each piece of jewelry that campers painstakingly created was pounded out from metal before being tossed into a bucket of sharp objects. The bucket was plugged then in and jarred, allowing for the sharp objects to rub away at the metal's imperfections. It was a loud, messy ordeal. There was a wait before each creator was reunited with its creation.
It's the same for you and me. We are the jewelry, this life the bucket of sharp objects. We are the impure, the bucket is our process. We are the work of someone's hands, He is our sanctification.
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