At the moment, my stomach is growling and my senses are teased by the scent of pizza baking in the oven. It’s torture, actually, to breathe in that divine smell and know its still 15 minutes until I can eat it! As I tried to concentrate on the book I’m reading, my mind drifted off to what’s happening in the oven just several feet away from me: my pizza is cooking. It is changing shapes and being completely altered from something raw, frozen (don’t judge me, friends! some busy days simply call for frozen pizza) and unedible to something deliciously baked and delightful. I don’t have to do anything to it, really. It’s all about the heat that is inside that oven.
Heat.
If I think about this in a very simplistic way, what happens inside my oven on a daily basis is actually quite phenomenal. Drastic change takes place in there. Because of the heat, bread rises and cookies bake. Things are transformed from one thing into something else. Before the oven: unedible. After the oven: delectable.
All simply because of heat.
In the bigger picture of my life, I think about the refining fire that we each walk through at different seasons of life. That refining fire is not a malicious form of torture God forces us into. No, quite on the contrary, just like Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego who were cast into a fiery furnace (Daniel 3), Jesus iswithus for every moment, right there in the flames next to us. He ever so tenderly uses the “heat” and trials in the broken world around us to transform us from one thing into something else entirely, something absolutely delightful. The heat purifies our hearts, it challenges our beliefs, it opens our eyes to the yuck in our hearts and brings us to our knees as we realize how desperately we need His love and grace. We are transformed into something absolutely beautiful, all because of heat.
I don’t know what kind of heat we will face in this journey of adoption. There will be plenty of potholes in the road and frustrations along the way, I am sure. This will definitely be one of the refining fires in our lives. But as we willing and joyfully surrender ourselves to being baked in the oven, I am confident that the fruit in our lives will be well worth all the heat.
Speaking of heat, that 15 minutes is up… time for lunch! :-)
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