When Life Beats You Up

Hi Friends,

Sometimes it just feels like life is beating you up. And sometimes it feels like the choices of others are making it worse. And something it seems that God just won't make it stop. Here's some help from Reaching for Wonder (which you can pre-order now!)

Excerpt

Isaiah 28:28-29 says:

Bread grain is crushed, but the thresher doesn’t thresh it forever.  

He drives the cart wheel over it; he spreads it out but doesn’t crush it.

This also comes from the Lord of heavenly forces,

who gives wondrous counsel and increases wisdom.

Threshing is “the process of loosening the edible part of cereal grain (or other crop) from the scaly, inedible chaff that surrounds it. It is the step in grain preparation after harvesting and before winnowing, which separates the loosened chaff  from the grain.”

Threshing is difficult. Sometimes it takes a long time. Sometimes it feels like a beating, as if the oxen have been stomping you forever or the threshing wheel crushing you over and over and over. And yet, Isaiah assures us that the threshing will not go on forever, because threshing is for a purpose. It’s to get rid of the chaff. It is to prepare the grain for making bread.

It’s not about blame. It’s never about blame. It’s not about excuses for staying stuck. It’s about the purpose of the threshing: to make something new, something useful, something good.

Psalm 104:14-15 says of God:

You make grass grow for cattle;

you make plants for human farming in order to get food from the ground,

and wine, which cheers people’s hearts, along with oil, 

which makes the face shine, and bread, which sustains the human heart.

Our God is the God of Bread-Making. He doesn’t thresh us forever. Instead, he makes us into bread to bless and sustain others.

We can only be all we need to be in Christ when we accept the God of Bread-Making. It’s not about who’s to blame for what happened before. It’s not about who’s to blame for what might come. It’s about what God is doing right before us, right now. It’s about him asking the question, “Do you want to get well?”

Do you want to be made into bread?