The month of July has become a hard month to encounter! Page after page of my devotional diary is riveted with painfilled memories. The kind of memories it is impossible to believe you experienced! Only painful memories would remain if it were not for the emerging pearls.

“Nearly all God’s jewels are crystallized tears” suggests my Streams in the Desert devotional. And a promise to those who find strength despite their pain is to mount up with wings as eagles… to walk and not faint (Isaiah 40:31). Our difficulties are the very avenue in which we encounter more of God…more of the One Who secured our rescue…

But when we refuse to see Him in the difficulty, when we refuse to receive what His plan has written into our story, we miss the opportunity of growing and knowing our Creator, and experiencing a relationship that blesses our lives like nothing else can. Our heavenly Father went to great lengths to buy us out of the marketplace from spiritual death to everlasting peace, contentment and real joy…through the precious blood of His one and only perfect Son…yet we disparagingly cast our lot for the relationships of here and now, the temporal over the eternal.

When we choose to follow Christ, and stop clutching the world around us, we are made free to experience a rich, full, lasting, and enjoyable relationship with God Most High—that brings Him so much glory (1 Corinthians 10:31; Psalm 96:7-9; Revelation 4:11)!

“I have chosen thee in the furnace of affliction,” says Isaiah (48:10). The month of July may have my oldest sister and baby brother (only brother) feeling that way, but they are in good company! The Bible sheds light on many who flourished despite their afflictions. The Prophet Isaiah repeatedly wrote to not fear and yet, tradition reports he was killed by being cut in two (Hebrews 11:32 & 37). These great men and women who have gone before us gained through their faith having run the race while not losing heart!

One of my very favorite quotes from my Streams devotional has ministered to my heart for almost 29 years…it relates such truth:

“The burden of suffering seems a tombstone hung about our necks, while in reality it is only the weight which is necessary to keep down the diver while he is hunting for pearls.”

Don’t lose heart; ask God to help you find the pearls!