Sorry, short break while I go make a cup of hot chocolate....
Precisely one minute and forty-five seconds later...I'm back! :) Imagine one day my milk starts talking to me. It complains that it is too cold in the refrigerator and that it would like to try being warm. So, I stick it in the microwave and before the first minute is up, it is complaining it is getting a little too warm. Then, I have the indecency to dump in chocolate powder and it complains that it doesn't like brown and why didn't I try to turn it blue or pink or orange? It also detests being stirred and complains bitterly about being heated for even more seconds. When, at last, it has been turned into a delicious mug of hot chocolate it cries and says heatedly that it wishes I had spilled it on the way from the refrigerator rather than having gone through all the hassle and unpleasantness.
It is a little bit ridiculous to think of milk talking, even more so that it wouldn't want to become something as delicious as hot chocolate! But even as I sit here contemplating this whole ridiculous situation I find that I myself am often rather like this "sour" milk. I tell God I'm too cold, then too hot, I say I don't like brown, I'd prefer green, I complain about being stirred, and I whine about the rising temperatures. I don't even notice that he's working to improve me, that he's turning me into something even better than cold milk. He's making me warm and chocolatey and all I can say is I wish I was a puddle on the floor. It's a little like the verse in Isaiah:
You turn things upside down, as if the potter were thought to be like the clay! Shall what is formed say to the one who formed it, "You did not make me"? Can the pot say to the potter, "You know nothing"?
Or, perhaps sometimes I am aware of the uncomfortable circumstances are caused by God and I tell him that I'm hot enough, that I can't take any more microwaving, I'm fine with being just hot milk. That's when he takes me out and I think I'm done, he says "not yet" and calmly sticks me back in. Because, God does not want us to be comfortable. He wants us to be mature and complete, not lacking in anything. In fact, if God were to take us out before we had learned from our trial or hard situation, he would be doing us a disservice. We would be a lukewarm chocolate that no one wants to drink.
The fact of the matter is, I need to be heated up, stirred up, and changed by God into something delicious into a pleasing aroma of Christ amongst those who are being saved and those who are perishing. And all the while, he holds the mug in his capable hands. He knows exactly how long I need to be in each and every situation of each and every day. And I have the audacity to complain. I am silly foolish milk, but by the grace of God, I don't have to stay that way.
