Slow Roasting In The Fires Of Affliction
While it is perfectly possible with enough heat to cook almost anything in ten minutes or less, there are legitimate reasons that recipes sometimes call for a little more time in the oven. Indeed, certain foods may have their cooking time measured not in minutes or hours but in days. Meat that is slow roasted over days can achieve a level of tenderness that would be impossible if the cooking time was made any less. It is natural that when we find ourselves in the fires of affliction that we would desire to spend as little time as possible being roasted. Intellectually we may accept that God has lessons to teach us in our adversity that we can learn in no other way, but is it quite so necessary for us to remain exposed to such intense heat for such a long time? Couldn’t we instead of cooking for eight hours at one hundred fifty degrees instead endure two hours at six hundred degrees? Yes, the suffering may be more intense but it will be over quicker. But just as thrusting a hunk of meat into the heart of the fire will blacken and harden the outside while leaving the center unchanged, so too would our hearts tend to become hardened and unchanged if we had control over the heat and duration of our trials. Our Heavenly Father knows us and He knows exactly at what temperature to set our afflictions and for exactly how long they must be endured before He has helped us to achieve the exact degree of tenderness in our hearts. If we can just trust in His timing, when He has finally pulled us out of the fire, we will with gladness embrace our reprieve and acknowledge with all sincerity that our trial lasted the exact right time, and all of our suffering would have been for nought if we had pulled out according to our own timing instead of His. As unpleasant as the wait might be, there are some things that you cannot rush, and if we can just learn to be patient, we will have become all the better for it. I know that God will not leave us in the fire a moment shorter or longer than is necessary.
