Month: November 2021

Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays. I love the hubbub and bustle in the kitchen. I love the gathering of friends and family and the laughing and the lingering around the table.

There’s one part that can be a little awkward. You might know the moment – everyone goes around the table and says what they’re thankful for. It’s tough to come up with something original when you’re at the end of the line. And then there are those times when you look back over the year and don’t feel particularly grateful for your circumstances.

There’s a line in Psalm 66 we read recently that you probably won’t hear anyone saying around the Thanksgiving table – “Praise the Lord, all peoples, let the sound of his praise be heard; he has preserved our lives and kept our feet from slipping. For you, God, tested us; you refined us like silver” (Psalm 66:8-10).

Praise the Lord… for you tested us. This doesn’t normally make the list of things for which we’re grateful. In part because we generally don’t think we need much refinement. We tend to think of ourselves as pretty much ok. Certainly not perfect, but not all that bad. So we aren’t particularly grateful when the Lord sets about removing impurities and weakness from us.

Even when we know something’s no good, we’re often hesitant to seek a change because we’re pretty sure that it’s going to hurt. When silver is refined, something hard and solid is softened and liquefied. Molecular bonds are broken. It’s not a gentle process. Transformation rarely is.

Take another look at our verse – the Lord’s goal in all this is to preserve our lives. It’s not senseless or random. It has a very specific purpose. So He “sits like a refiner of silver, watching closely as the dross is burned away” (Malachi 3:3). He doesn’t toss us into the fire and wish us luck. Instead He promises “I will be with you always” (Matthew 28:20). It’s God Himself who is doing the refining – He will not let it go on too long or go too far because “He is good [and] His faithful love endures forever” (Psalm 107:1).

It’s God’s love that lasts forever, not the refining process. Your circumstances will change. One day, His work in us will be finished (James 1:4). We will be able to say along with the psalmist, “We went through fire and flood. But you brought us to a place of great abundance” (Psalm 66:12).

When I was 13, I fell in the woods and was impaled by a stick. I promise to leave out the gory details. Suffice it to say, a well-meaning adult tried to pull it out; that didn’t work. There followed several (painful) hours trying to get out the chunk of wood. Eventually I went to the ER, where the doctor made a small incision and removed it. Easy peasy.

When we’re wounded, well-meaning people sometimes do more harm than good. So if we’re approaching another person in trauma, we have to tread carefully. See Job’s friends, whose comfort and counsel was utterly incorrect (Job 42:7). Surely it can’t have helped Job in his misery for them to come along and insist he must have brought it on himself through some hidden or overlooked sin. 

There are times when we need a professional to do expert surgery. What makes sense to us is actually not the best course of treatment. We put our trust in someone else to do for us what we can’t do for ourselves (Ephesians 2:8-9).

There’s a little more to my stick story. The stick had actually gone all the way to the bone, so in order to heal properly, the wound had to be kept open so that everything could grow back from the inside out. In my case, the injury reached a point when it stopped getting better. A return to the doctor showed that there was a tiny, tiny bit of wood still in my leg. The body was using all its tools to get it out without success – it was too deep to do it without help.

When our wounds are very deep, we need to expect that they will heal slowly, getting smaller over time. But sometimes there’s something that hasn’t been dealt with, and that will keep us from healing. Then we may become angry, inflamed, sensitive to the slightest touch. It’s our mechanism for trying to work out what’s still causing us pain. Even after time has passed, the old hurt can still linger and the old reactions flare up. We have to be willing to return to the expert, again and again if necessary, until He has completed the cure.

The scar on my leg isn’t pretty. Neither are the ones we carry on the inside. But they are evidence that we’ve survived and that we’re still here. They showcase the miraculous work of the Great Physician. They give us a story to tell in which we’re able to say, “The Lord stood with me and gave me strength” (2 Timothy 4:17).