Trust the Process

 

Women are known to go to great lengths to enhance and improve their appearance. For me, the most pleasurable splurge is a good facial.  

Though the clinician begins with a gentle soothing cleanse, the tools are soon out. 

She explains, “This will get a bit painful, but the longer you endure, the more we can clean out the dirt. "  

“Just a little bit more,” I tell myself.

Shortly after the procedure, my face enters a not-so-pretty phase of redness, dryness, and skin flaking.  Experts call it peeling post-treatment.  

My husband often observes skeptically, “Are you sure that was a great idea??” he says.

While for days, all I can see is flaking and terribly dry skin, beneath, a unique transformation occurs.  New and rejuvenated skin slowly emerges, replacing the dying old skin.  Though I don't entirely enjoy the process, I’d do it again in a heartbeat. 

 I’ve come to find our spiritual renewal undergoes a similar process.  

When God begins his good work in us, the process itself may not be the most pleasant—it often involves difficult and painful tests and trials.

Like my complexion, spiritual renewal requires discarding and the dying away of the old to embrace the new.  For a while, all that we presently encounter is the difficulties and the trials.  While God is after going deep and surfacing the hidden things within that need to go.

On the surface, it appears the process can’t be helping me, it’s harming me.  But lo and behold, beyond the eye's view, a transformation occurs.  

All this is for your benefit,...That is why we never give up. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day.  ( Co. 4:15-16 NIV)

Supporting Text

For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it. (Heb 12:11)