Wax on, Wax off.

It is so easy to forget the mercy of God or the shaping and molding of his perfect plan. When we are in situations sometimes we overlook the mercy of God when we face pain. It seems so unfair. Life just slams us right in the face and we really dont know how to respond or even how to press on. We ask ourselves where is God in this situation? We look around and cry out in our agony, stress and misery but find no relief. We feel that ceiling has heard more about our problems than God has. If only the ceiling could talk back. I know through personal struggles though, we are refined and made stronger through his perfect plan.
Its like that of a soldiers training. There are the smallest little things that a drill sargeant will bark and yell over. At that one certain point the soldier begins to question the purpose of it. It begins to plague his mind as he believes that it is more for torture and punishment. It begins to cloud every aspect of his thought process. How funny does it become when the soldier wants to quit and begins to mentally shut down at that task at hand. His thoughts begin to drift slowly away to a place where he doesnt need to be. His focus is drawn on the negative, and at the point of quitting his drill sargeant begins to regale him of the many varied usefull tools he has learned in that one task. Just as karate kid had to wax on and wax off; we too go through those varieties of situations.
Its just like that in our life. We go through a variety of different "training" times in our life. We think that we are losing our mind and that we are about to lose it all. We get so frustrated and aggravated at the small things in life that it begins to rip apart our minds and hearts. We cant focus on the task at hand and we just recognize only the negative. We scream and cry out to God but get no response. We feel so small and insignificant that our problems soon overwhelm us and pull us to the bottom. But yet how many times do we not realize that we are actually learning a valuable and life long lesson that will help us the rest of our lives. These things in our life that stress us and we see as torture actually serve a double purpose. We need to change our mentality in this area we need to shift it from thinking of it as something unnatural to becoming a teaching lesson. So many times we allow ourselves to be caught up in our own ego that we forget the glory and beauty of God. In Isaiah 48, God is speaking to the children of Israel of this very specific thing. They had forgotten the beauty and glory of God and his faithfullness. THey had become so dependent on their own strength that God allowed them to face hard and rough times to recalibrate their focus off of themselves and back to Him. Isaiah 48: 10 says " See, i have refined you, though not as silver, i have tested you in the furnace of affliction. 11 For my own sake, for my own sake i do this. How can i let my self be defamed? I will not yield my glory to another." God places us in times that we need to truly understand are teaching times and times that will stretch our faith and allow us to become stronger in Him. When our focus leaves that of Christ there comes a point where we need to be refined and redirected by Christ. Just as a drill sargeant leads his troops into teaching exercises, Christ also leads us. When you face a situation remember you are being refined by fire to show all of Gods glory and not the glory of another.