Good morning and enjoying the coolness! A tribulation has come to your life. Like Job, you sit in ashes in your only remaining sackcloth with friends telling you to confess something you didn't do and a wife encouraging you to curse God and die. The job at the office has you down and you long ago lost count of the 'stabs to the back' from your coworkers. Somewhere along the line the Shepherd must have lost track of you. There is no way a loving God could allow all this to happen, you say as something else goes wrong for you. Jesus obviously lost one sheep, and your life must be the one that He lost. You turn to a worldly counselor and after listening to your life's story, he can only say, "Wow, that's messed up!" We all at one time or another think that God or His Son or perhaps both have lost track of us. Ours is the one life that has gone off the rails so far that even the Almighty God cannot bring it back.
When Job says, "Woe is me." You argue the point and claim the position. When Paul calls himself the chiefest and worst of sinners, you are there to elbow him aside. Nothing went right in your life from day one and why should tomorrow be any different. Then someone comes along to point out that 1.5 million children in Africa may starve to death, and you are not starving. Another article points out that millions remain in slavery though we long ago thought that abolished forever, and you live in a free country. Finances got you down? Someone else has lost more, been deeper in debt, gone bankrupt more times, or failed more businesses than you. We can always find a 'worse than' story. I like to collect them to go with my experiences. Those stories remind me that always God has been very carefully and masterfully in control of my development through tribulations.
We tend to look at ourselves wrong. Imagine Jesus bent over a plate of diamonds on a jeweler's table. Every diamond is carefully weighed, cut, smoothed, filed, categorized, and accounted for at all times. It is true that many of the diamonds are still in their rough shape. Some so rough that they do not yet look much like a diamond and only the creator of the diamonds can possibly know that a diamond is in that lump of hard material. Your analysis of your own state may agree with the Master at this point, but that is no reason to leave the table. If one diamond slips or hops off the table, Jesus stops everything to go bring that diamond back. He knows where all of His other diamonds are, and He will not lose even one. In you and in me, the Master will bring out the diamond He created.
Yes, that Christian diamond you see at the church on Sunday may seem to get less polishing than you and yet appears to gleam all the brighter. Yes, that other one over there never seems to endure a tribulation in his life. Maybe in this one thing you are correct, and you are the roughest, dirtiest, most hidden gem of the whole lot. It could be that even the Apostle Paul didn't need as much work as you do to become a beautifully cut diamond for Christ. Praise God and be joyful, no matter what your condition, Christ will do whatever it takes to make you into what He would have you to be. If you are in rougher shape than another Christ-one, then you will get more of the loving attention of the Master. Perhaps way down deep under that rough material is a core of diamond strength that Jesus is working hard to bring out to show the world. Your light may be hidden for now, your diamond may not seem as large as that evangelist on television, but when you are unveiled at last in your cut and polished state after all those terrible tribulations, Jesus will show us all a very bright, beautiful, and strong gem.
Bucky
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