“Therefore, if ye do not remember to be charitable, ye are as dross, which the refiners do cast out, (it being of no worth) and is trodden under foot of men.” (Alma 34:29). Philosophers have debated for millennia whether men and women are inherently good or inherently evil. In some versions of this debate, it is taken as a given that it must be one or the other. One might make the same kind of argument about a precious metal-containing ore sample. Is it inherently gold, or inherently dross? Unless one is so very unlucky as to not extract even an ounce of gold, the answer is that the ore is both gold and dross. So it is with us. We both have nobler and baser instincts and tendencies. What is more, each of us is required to go through the refiner's fire. However, we each have a decision to make while we are in the heat of the furnace. We can choose either to identify with and hold onto and fight with everything that we have to keep either the gold or the dross. The gold is charity, or the pure love of Christ. It is that light of Christ within us that calls on us, even in the midst of the greatest trials of our lives to nevertheless be kind and loyal and decent and self-sacrificing. It is not easy to think clearly when we are in the furnace. It is not easy to remember that the purpose of the refiner's fire is to separate the gold from the dross, or that we should try to keep the gold and discard the dross. After all, there is often so much more dross than gold, and it has a way of sticking to us. It makes so much more sense and feels so right when we hold onto our self-righteous anger and resentment and justifications. We have been hurt too much and too often, we've had the deck stacked against us for too long, we've been cut off so thoroughly from our friends and family, that when we feel the separation of love and hate, good and evil, right and wrong, selflessness and selfishness, us and them, rather than embracing and holding onto the pure gold of charity, we wallow in the burnt and blackened remnants of our now love-free selves. We feared too much the undeniable value of pure and refined love that we clung instead to the familiar and comfortable and miserable dross that we secretly believed was all that we deserved. Perfect love casts fear out, and if we fear the dark more than we love the light, then we will be the dross that gets cast out. I hope when we find that our refining fires are extracting the inherent good inside of us from the inherent evil inside of us, that we do not put ourselves on the dross side of that separation but rather that we embrace the good and be stored up with the other golden treasures of Heaven.
