20. April 2011 19:23
Pearls are beautiful, but are formed through a long and perhaps what could be likened to a painful process. So does beauty emerge from pain and suffering? A pearl is formed from an irritant such as a bit of dirt or grit becoming lodged in an oyster’s shell. The oyster tries hard to get rid of it, but by doing so produces a substance which coats the thing that is irritating it, and it keeps on doing this until it produces a pearl.
Lent seems to be about giving things up, and denying ourselves various pleasures, but for a lot of us we may already be living through and experiencing tough times, and I’ve been thinking about how God is amazingly able to use what we are going through to teach us and perhaps even change us. I know suffering is not easy, and I don’t believe it’s necessarily God’s choice for us to suffer, but He is able to use these incredibly difficult periods in our lives....To carve and shape us; to develop character, patience, endurance and much more. So it seems beauty can come from suffering, and perhaps through it we are being made into beautiful pearls!
“Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.” 2 Cor 4:16-18
Jen Webb