Refine: Five Minute Friday

This week's Five Minute Friday linkup is like every week. We write with a timer and publish our rough draft as a final offering. We then link up and comment on the person before us. Every time, I am blessed and encouraged by what others write on the same word. Sometimes it's a rhyme, sometimes it's free-form poetry, sometimes it's a beautiful anecdote, and sometimes it's a raw, vulnerable snapshot of life in its fullest.
The community is faith-based and we bond over one word a week. Join us, won't you? Here's Kate's link.

This week's word?

Refine.

Go!

For many of us, the thought of refining does not conjure up comfort. And in seasons of refining, it's dually unpleasant. Not only are you being held in fire hotter than you can physically stand, (You are a molten puddle instead of a solid object) but you are also seeing impurities float to the surface before they're removed.

Not many things are uglier than your own sins that you'd just as rather not face. Yet, God has bigger dreams for us than we can fathom. The sign of full refining is that the silver is so clean and clear that the refiner can see His own reflection in the metal. That analogy, or metaphor? Not wasted on us word-lovers.

Can people see Jesus reflected in me? What needs to be refined and removed so that it's not about Tammy anymore?

Today is January 21. I have been through a MONTH of refining and recovering and more refining and more recovering. My heart has been broken twice and my blood pressure has been from Mount Everest to the Dead Sea and back, I think.

And yet, I am being allowed to see that it's not about me and it never has been.

We miss so often the point of refining. It's so that GOD can be GLORIFIED. What credit is it to God if we're perfect humans preaching the gospel to imperfect sinners? None.
But, if He saves imperfect humans and they spread that hope and good news to other imperfect humans? And we're redeemed but not fully perfected and we constantly need Him and mistakes are proof we are trying? And He's all about that grace, that grace...
(sorry. I abhor that pop song but my mind wandered for a second)

And, time's up.

And the end of the story? I am in a job that refines you constantly and challenges you, and I was sent an encourager who reassured me "You're doing great!" And another encourager that said she had the same experience in a challenge that I'd had and she was just as surprised. God is allowing me to be edified in the midst of this. He brought me to this to bring me through this, and it is for His credit and glory that I should pray even harder and embrace the fact that I'm enough of a threat to the enemy that he's sending attacks my way.

God is Good.
Amen.

-Tammy
(p.s. please include your linkup number or URL in your comment so I can be sure to find your post as well!)