Seven Times In The Furnace

She holds it up to the window the way she holds everything up to the window, and she is braced for it to bend, and it does not.

A workshop with one good window on the west side, so at this hour the light comes in properly for about forty minutes and then goes. Benches. A vice. A tray of small parts sorted by somebody who cared, into compartments, years ago. Two other people in the room doing their own work and not looking up.

She tests things. That is what she is. It is not skepticism and it is not sourness, and anybody who has called it either has not spent time with her: she has simply never in her life been able to accept a thing on the strength of who was saying it.

She is the person people bring things to. She is the one who says the sentence nobody wants said. She has been right often enough that it has cost her some friendships and saved two organizations, and she has made her peace with the arithmetic of that.

And it has left her with a private problem she has never described to another human being.

She cannot receive anything.

Not because she does not want to. Because the same instrument runs on everything, and it runs on comfort too, and on kindness, and on the things people say to her when she is at the end of herself. Somebody tells her she is loved and the instrument turns over and starts examining the sentence for load bearing failures, and by the time it has finished the moment has gone.

So today she is holding one sentence up to the light, on purpose, at a bench, testing it deliberately as hard as she tests anything.

And it does not bend.

That is you, if you have ever been the one who checks, and if you have quietly noticed that the checking never switches off for the good things.

Two plain things before anything else. If somebody in your life is frightening you or hurting you, nothing here is telling you to stand there and absorb it; tell one person today who can act. And whatever this is, it is not a person. Scripture is direct that the struggle is not against flesh and blood, and that is a mercy rather than a technicality, because it means you can stop losing to somebody you also love.

The verse invites the furnace

There is a line in a psalm that makes a claim about the words of God, and the striking thing is what it compares them to.

The words of the LORD are pure words: as silver tried in a furnace of earth, purified seven times.Psalm 12:6

Tried. Which is the old word for tested.

Notice that the psalm does not say the words of God are lovely, or precious, or comforting, though they are all three. It reaches for an image of something that has been through the hardest process available for finding out whether a thing is what it claims to be, and it says: seven times.

Seven times is not modest. It is not a claim that this would probably hold up if somebody looked. It is a claim that it has already been put through the process, repeatedly, to a degree nobody would ask for, and has come out the same.

Which means the testing is not the enemy of this and never was.

That is not a small thing to say to a woman at a bench, because everything in her life has taught her that the checking is the problem, that if she could only stop checking she could receive things like other people do, and that her instrument is the reason she is alone with certain things.

You are holding something that was put through the furnace before it was ever handed to you. That is not a comfort in a workshop: Psalm 12:6 reaches for the language of testing rather than the language of reassurance, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a tried thing hold under a woman who tests everything rather than the willingness anybody can find to accept something unexamined.

Nobody is asking you to switch it off

Now the part that has to be said carefully, because this is where people like her get told the wrong thing by well meaning teachers.

She has been told to stop analyzing. She has been told to just receive it. She has been told that her questions get in the way, and every one of those was said kindly and every one of them landed as a criticism of the one thing about her that has been useful to everybody in the room.

Nothing on this page is telling her to stop. The instrument is good. It has been right. It is not the reason she cannot receive things and it is not a spiritual failing, and anybody who has implied that it was has misread both her and this verse.

The verse does not ask for an exemption from testing. It offers itself to it, on the grounds of having been through worse.

You have never once been asked to put down the thing that made you useful in order to be held. The written word describes itself as tried in a furnace and purified seven times, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes a tested thing hold, never a person's ability to stop asking questions.

There is no key on this page and no technique, and there is nothing here that would collapse if you leaned on it hard. That is deliberate. Anything that needed handling gently would be no use to you at all.