the furnace

Jn.6:13, "So they gathered them up and filled twelve baskets with fragments from the five barley loaves left by those who had eaten."

This is our God. He multiplies little into abundant suffiscience when He is in it.

If you choose the hard path - like Larissa marrying brain-injured Ian, or someone adopting a disabled child - you are choosing for God to increase the heat in the furnace of your life, the means by which our gold is purified of its dross on the way to Heaven.

I know the end is good. I know that having dreams stripped away in order to gain the greater joy of God Himself, is not a loss, not a poor trade. Indeed he is a fool who cannot loose his grasp on all his possessions in order to gain that Pearl of great value instead. Only a fool gains the world at the cost of losing his soul.

My flesh still recoils.  It must be faith alone that willingly chooses the furnace, if God will be glorified in it.