A story refreshed

Today I went to church literally down the street, a few houses down from the YDC

As I rethink through the experience, the irony only now hits me; the church's name is Pietermaritzburg Christian Fellowship, or as they abreviate it, PCF :S

It's a church made out of the old Pietermaritzburg prison, the prison which Gandhi was held when he was here, which is pretty cool

Worship was an interesting experience, where the first song (though unknown to me) was in English, the second in Zulu (which is becoming a more familiar sound to me) and the third in Afrikaans, which was simply bizar

The message, was about 'suffering', which I'm always interested in hearing about from the different biblical perspectives out there

Surprisingly (I know, I'm a cynical bastard :P) the message was sound and good, with important distinctions in the detail of points

I took notes, but the one thing that stuck out for me the most, was an analogy I'd heard many, many times before

The story goes that a womens study group had come upon a passage in Malachi 3:3, which refers to God as a refiner and purifier of silver

Not familiar with the process, one of the women volunteered to research the process, to report back to the group the next meeting

So she visited a silver smith (not sure if that's the term for them, it was just the one the speaker used), who showed her the process

It involves the placement of the silver in the hottest part of the flame, to burn away the impurities

Now at this point, I was like, yeah, yeah... I mean I'd heard it, and even sung about it like a billion times over

But the story continued, and I learnt some interesting new bits

If the piece is left in the flame for a moment too long, it is destroyed; therefore, the silver smith eyes are ALWAYS focussed on it when it is in the flame

Why then is it, in times of hardness, we (or at least I), think we're alone...

But the bit that really got me, that cut straight to my core was how the story ended

At this point, the woman then asked the silver smith how he knew then, when the silver was ready

"That's the easy part. It's when I can see my reflection in it"