Too proud to accept it?

But as for me, I will sing about your power. Each morning I will sing with joy about your unfailing love. For you have been my refuge, a place of safety when I am in distress. (Psalm 59:16)

Where do you turn when you are in distress? Do you veg out in front of the TV, streaming this or that in the hopes you can take your mind off whatever is causing all the stress? Do you head to the fridge or scour the cupboards to find another snack? Do you go online to buy one more thing you really won't use all that much? What we do in our times of stress and where it is we turn when we need to 'destress' is very important for us to recognize. It could show us just how much we depend upon what 'we' can do rather than what God wants to do.

Things will always be there that give us great pain, anxiety, or sorrow. It is part of life to deal with this kind of stuff. The acute physical or mental anguish the stressful thing causes isn't meant to be dealt with on our own, though. When we are attempting to deal with it all on our own, we are likely to find our 'fix' for the stress is not quite hitting the mark. We might even get to the place where we feel more guilty about having done whatever it is we did to 'destress' than we felt the anguish of the original stress!

Stress is 'natural', but we have been given supernatural strength to overcome it. When we turn to Jesus at the first notice of the distressing thing, we might just find the physical or mental anguish we 'could' experience is already made lighter because he is taking that load off of our minds and hearts and placing it in his. The more we learn to turn to him first, the less guilt and anxiety we will feel over our not so perfect 'fixes' to the stress because we won't be heaping guilt upon guilt on top of all that stress.

Have you ever refused a helping hand? I have, and it wasn't because I didn't need it. It was because I was too proud to accept it. When God reaches out to you in your 'distress', he is asking you to take his hand so he can help you get through it easier. Will the stressful stuff still be there for us to 'go through'? Probably, but we 'go through' together, not alone. We 'go through' in his strength and power, not ours. Just sayin!

What on earth are you producing here?

For we are the product of His hand, heaven’s poetry etched on lives, created in the Anointed, Jesus, to accomplish the good works God arranged long ago.  (Ephesians 2:10 VOICE)

Gandhi said, "My life is my message."  Nothing can be truer than that statement except maybe, "My life, with Christ lived through it, is my message."  Our passage refers to it as "heaven's poetry etched on our lives".  Grace isn't just something we "get" - it is something we see affecting our lives, changing our testimony, and actually turning our lives into a message from God's hand itself.  An author doesn't set out to "just write" - he has a message in mind as he begins the task of creating the masterpiece he will one day finish.  I imagine God to be quite the same as an author - a mindset for what the end result will be, creating scenes all along the way, orchestrating the "building of the story", until we see the climax of it all when he loudly declares, "Well done, my good and faithful servant."

We are the "product" of his hand.  A product is meant to be used in some fashion - it isn't just created, tossed aside, and then forgotten.  God's intent for each of us is to become the thing he uses to declare the beauty of forgiveness, the bigness of his grace, and the boundlessness of his love.  As the products of his hands there is nothing "ugly" about us. God doesn't create ugly things - evil does.  Evil is not part of God's make-up, so it is impossible for him to produce a product which is less than perfect - as he is perfect and all he does is perfect!

A product may also be produced simply because of the environment it is within.  For example, diamonds are not "natural" - they are formed by the pressure placed on carbon deep within the earth.  Eventually, they rise little by little to the surface and are mined. Even in their "raw" state, they aren't all that "beautiful".  It takes more and more cutting, fashioning, and specific application of skill to produce the diamond we will proudly wear. Sometimes I think we are quite impatient when it comes to seeing "God's product" produced within us.  We don't realize all the work required to bring the greatest amount of beauty from each of us!

Etching may be accomplished by the placement of acid upon the surface until the surface is altered by the application.  The acid actually leaves a mark which was specifically "purposed" to be there.  Acid isn't all that "palatable", but when it is applied by a skilled craftsman it produces a beautiful work expressive of something the craftsman saw as lending beauty to the object.  

God may use a little pressure, and even a little bit of what seems to "sting" or "burn" a little to produce the most beautiful things in our lives.  We shouldn't resist this process, because it is the process which produces the object's beauty!  Just sayin!