As the years go by, the month of July has become a cruel month to cycle through! It is fraught with pain-filled memories. The kind that immobilizes a person causing one to wonder how you ever made it through or that you even experienced what has been scribbled down in your devotional journal. Yet only painful memories would remain if it were not for the emerging pearls!

“Nearly all God’s jewels are crystallized tears.” This quote can be found in my tear-stained Streams in the Desert devotional. Many have found pearls amid their suffering and have shared through their writings how God can make good come in the face of suffering. Just as He did when He sent His One and Only Perfect Son to the cross of agony and torment on our behalf, to provide an antidote to sin and death.

“…How can you say the LORD does not see your troubles…Have you never heard? Have you never understood? The Lord is the everlasting God the Creator of all the earth. He never grows weak or weary. No one can measure the depths of his understanding. He gives power to the weak and strength to the powerless. Even youths will become weak and tired, and young mean will fall in exhaustion. But those who trust in the LORD will find new strength. They will soar high on wings like eagles. They will run and not grow weary. They will walk and not faint” (Isaiah 40:27-31, NLT).

A beautiful promise given to God’s chosen people, Isarel but also true for us—His Church! God is all-powerful and He can give strength to those who need it. And not only in Isaiah but throughout God’s Word a vast number of pearls are found. We should never fixate on our burden, but on the God Who sees and knows our troubles~ He has a plan and He uses the very tragedies we combat to lift us up on eagle’s wings where we can encounter more of God…more of the One Who secured our rescue…

However, when we refuse to see Him in the hard, painful places of this life and obediently receive what His plan has written into our story, we miss the opportunity to know and love God and experience the abundant life we were meant to have in Christ. 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 Son. But often we become enamored with the relationships of here and now, the temporal over the eternal.

“I have chosen thee in the furnace of affliction” (Isaiah 48:10).

The month of July may have my oldest sister and brother feeling that way, but they are in good company! The Bible sheds light on many who flourished despite their afflictions and acquired pearls of great worth. 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 pearls of great worth 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 many years now…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!

“Blessed is any weight, however overwhelming, which God has been so good as to fasten with His own hand upon our shoulders.” –F. W. Faber