Steel Yourself

Pure Iron isn't particularly tough. It rusts. It gets bent out of shape. But, if you mix iron with a little bit of carbon, you get steel. Steel is so strong and tough and reliable that it's used in just about everything. I've known for a long time that steel was an alloy of iron and carbon, but I was a little hazy on how they got the carbon into the steel. In fact, after a good twenty minutes of googling, I'm still a little hazy, but from what I understand, when they smelt iron in a furnace, the fuel they most often use for this process is called coke. Coke is made by cooking coal or oil in an oven or a kiln with no air until you basically have a fuel source that is pretty much just carbon. This coke is what goes into the furnace to make steel. The coke is both the source of heat to help melt the iron and also the source of carbon that goes into transforming iron into steel. I may or may not have mangled the explanation of how steel is made but I bring this all up to illustrate a lesson about the blessings that can come from sacrifices. I have written in the past about how the furnace of affliction can purify and refine us by burning off all of the impurities and dross. This is true. And from this point of view, it seems like all of those things that we give up to be burned away so that we can become pure are wasted and tossed out, just as dross is discarded once the pure metal has been refined. But I think that we can look at this from another angle. Iron ore doesn't enter the furnace just to have impurities removed, but to have carbon added into it. The fuel for the furnace gets burnt up, but not all of it is lost. Some of the carbon in the fuel is infused with the iron, making it stronger and tougher and more resilient. The Lord requires us to make sacrifices, but we can look at those sacrifices in two ways. We can view the things we give up as lost forever, or we can consider the possibility that in walking with faith into the furnace of affliction and offering up what we love most to be burned, a part of that sacrifice gets infused into our molten souls, like the carbon that transforms iron into steel. It is bitterly hard to watch the things we love go up in smoke, but if we will allow it, that smoke can bind with our souls and transform them into hardened steel. The Savior taught us that all of the stuff we care about can be corrupted and ruined by moths and rust, or stolen by thieves. But if we sacrifice such things, then we bake them into our eternal souls, and we will carry the very best part of those things with us all the way to heaven, where neither moth nor rust can corrupt them, nor thieves break in to steal them. I know that when we are in the furnace, the very last thing we want to do is add more fuel to the fire. But if we want to come out the other side strong as steel then we need to burn up some of our treasures - not to lose them but to carry them in our hearts forever.