Visions becoming reality

I've just the other side of the most challenging 24 hours that I've experienced in many years. In the very heart of that furnace I asked to be given eyes to see the lessons inherent in my situation; so that I could - for one - see them, so that - secondly - I could embrace them and learn from them and, thirdly, be forever changed and grown from the the experience. I also asked that I could quickly come to my senses, as the pain was excruciating.

In retrospect I learn't that God gives us a vision, and then He takes us down to the valley to batter us into the shape of that vision. And it's in the valley that so many of us give up and faint.

God has to take us into the valley and put us through fires and floods to batter us into shape, until we get to the point where He can trust us with the reality of the vision.

Ever since God gave us the vision, He has been at work. He is getting us into the shape of the goal He has for us, and yet over and over again we try to escape from the Sculptor's hand in an effort to batter ourselves into the shape of our own goal.

Forty years of desert and wilderness time, also sheer worldy abandon, has meant that I'm more than ready to relinquish every single one of my own goals.

(The middle three paragraphs are from Oswald Chambers' 'My Utmost for His Highest' - thank you!)