Glowsticks

I used to really like rocks.

I would collect them, read about them, and talk about them all the time.

Did I mention I didn’t have too many friends back then?

Anyway, because of my love of rocks all I wanted for Christmas one year was a Rock Tumbler, which was supposed to take the boring rocks I found in my back yard and turn them into beautiful polished gems over a certain period of time. I had no idea how long this certain period of time was supposed to be but I was super excited when I got one and, with the help of my mom, assembled everything and placed my ugly rocks into the little plastic bucket that fit into this rotating motor on the tumbler. The basic concept was that if you put enough rocks and a little bit of water into this bucket then they would slowly grind themselves to perfection while the machine continued to spin constantly. This sounded great until after a week of hearing the rumbling sound nonstop from our garage where the tumbler was all we had was what looked like a bucket of wet cement with a bunch of rock chunks in it.

The thing just kept grinding and grinding and we never saw results.

Life can feel like it is in a Rock Tumbler sometimes.

We know we need God to change us and help us grow and develop but sometimes it seems like we are just going in circles. The grinding process of our lives seems to have been going on forever and we look at ourselves and still just see ugly rocks. Everything goes in circles.

Every time we finally come back up for air and get our footing back life tends to throw us another curveball that sends s back to the grinding process.

This was what I felt the other day when I felt like God was saying to me that I would be going into a season of breaking. I wanted to point out to God the rough time I had been having lately. I wanted to remind him of every thing that went wrong last year. I felt like I deserved to at least leave a season of breaking before I entered a new one.

It was like God was saying “Hey remember that brief moment recently when you felt well rested and excited about life? Hope you enjoyed it.”

I had to ask myself, is my life going to be spent on a mountain or in a valley? If mostly a valley, then is it worth it at all?

 

I love the fall. It is absolutely beautiful outside. I love seeing the brilliant colors that trees become capable of painting themselves with. I walked outside the other day and saw  this tree that looked like it was on fire. I had never seen so many yellows and oranges on a tree before and I stood there breathless. I never noticed that that tree was even there because it just always blended into the rest of the forestry behind it.

I thought to myself, “Why can’t this tree look like this all the time? Why can’t it always be this beautiful?”

And then I remembered. This tree is dying.

Soon the leaves are going to turn from yellow to brown and then they will shrivel up and fall slowly to the ground. Then the branches will be bare and exposed to the harsh cold of winter while nobody even notices because of how ugly they have become.

I thought about how cruel of God it seemed to be to make this tree such a spectacle at its’ weakest point.

If this were the highlight of this trees’ life then it would be cruel but it isn’t, because next spring it will come back.

Every spring this tree sees will make it stronger and more beautiful. A truly great tree is one that has been through some things, and is still standing.

Life is not a question of either valley or mountaintop. We go through the valley so that we can become the mountaintop.

When you realize that the rest of the world living apart from Christ will experience a plateau life at best, never reaching the heights that they were created to reach, it is easy to see that the mountain tops are worth the valleys. It is impossible to live your whole life without being broken. The question is, then, who are we going to let do the breaking?

We can let the world break us, rob us of our identity and hope and send us to destruction, or we can let God break us so that He can reshape us, heal us, and set us toward a greater glory than we ever could imagine. It is not a choice of staying whole or being broken, it is just a choice of whether or not we want to be broken for a reason.

What does it mean to be in a season of breaking? What does it mean to let God break us? I think it is the only method possible for God to rip off and destroy all the things we have put on that keep us from being the light He created us to be.

For some reason, when Jesus said that we were the “light of the world” we got this image of a candle stuck in our heads. I think a more accurate picture would be a glowstick.

A glowstick is one of those plastic tubes filled with a strange neon liquid that undergoes a chemical reaction and begins to, well, glow. The thing is, though that  to start this chemical reaction, the tube has to be broken. Not breaking it would be an injustice to its purpose. If nobody snapped it then it would remain the rest of its life as a useless plastic tube. God snapping us in half is the best thing He could ever do for us.

That is not too fun to think about.

C.S. Lewis wrote in  A Grief Observed  that “God always knew my faith was a house of cards, Him knocking it down was His only way of showing me that.”

The thing about glowsticks is that they don’t last very long. Neither do we.

When the light of a glowstick begins fading, sometimes they have to be snapped again. Their life is a cycle of snapping and glowing, snapping and glowing, snapping and glowing.

There will come a point when snapping will do it no more good and everything has been completely used up that would give off any kind of light. And then that is the end.

We always feel like when God is braking us that this will be the last straw and that this time will be the one that does you in. The truth is, it might be.

It is a good thing that God never promises to make you live forever here on earth, but up in heaven where there will be no more need of breaking.

God, I give you permission to break me of everything that gets in the way of you glowing through me. Break me of everything that doesn’t look like you. Break me of my wants and desires that fail in comparison to the desires you have for me. Whatever it takes, break me. I want you to do the breaking and not the world that I live in. Whatever you do will be so much more worth it. I’ll take whatever you give me.