When glass is tempered, it is heated uniformly in a furnace and then the outer surface is rapidly cooled. The surface cools almost instantly but the core of the glass cools more slowly. When the body of the glass begins to cool, it contracts, pulling on the surface of the glass, which is already hard and inflexible. Thus, the outer surface of the glass is experiencing a compressive force as it is being squeezed towards the center, and the core of the glass is experiencing a force of tension as it is pulling the surface towards it. This internal tension makes the tempered glass four to five times tougher and harder than regular glass. It can shrug off blows that would shatter regular glass because it is already dealing with all of these internal forces pushing and pulling on it. Not only that, but when tempered glass does break, instead of breaking into jagged and dangerous irregular shards, it spiderwebs and breaks into safe, uniform pieces. We sometimes assume that there must be something fundamentally wrong with us if we are struggling to live up to our covenants. We may feel that God would love us better if we doubted or stumbled or sinned less often than we do. We might think that if we struggled less, then we would be stronger. But our strength comes from the struggle. Just like the push and pull of compressive and tensile forces in tempered glass makes the glass stronger, so too are we strengthened by the push and pull we have between our faith and our doubts, between our desire to give selflessly and to hold back selfishly, between the willingness of our spirit and the weakness of our flesh. We may try to grin and bear it and fake it ‘til we make it and do our best to look like we’re holding it together on the surface level while we are in the middle of the furnace, but once things start to cool down, we may still feel a lot of internal tension as our heart is slower to cool than the rest of us. The fact that we can’t forgive others or ourselves right away, that fact that we are not ready to make the changes that our loved ones are pleading with us to make as quickly as they would like us to make them, the fact that we keep returning like a dog to his vomit to old sins that we can’t seem to let go of, the fact that we can’t seem to chase away the fears that are crowding around us, but we haven’t given up yet and are fighting still just proves that we are far, far tougher than we give ourselves credit for. We may wish that we didn’t always have to deal with the tension and compression and exhaustion of this internal struggle, but if that struggle wasn’t there, then we would be brittle and fragile and when life finally broke us then we would shatter into destructive jagged edges. God didn’t put these opposing forces pushing and pulling us towards the celestial and the worldly just to mess with us. It can be hard, really hard, to recognize that both our pride and our humility, our faith and our fear, our joy and our sadness, our goodness and our wickedness are all vital, irreplaceable components to our strength. “And if men come unto me I will show unto them their weakness. I give unto men weakness that they may be humble; and my grace is sufficient for all men that humble themselves before me; for if they humble themselves before me, and have faith in me, then will I make weak things become strong unto them.” (Ether 12:27). God does not make weak things become strong by removing them or magically transforming them into strengths. He gives us weaknesses so that we may be humble, and that we may humbly accept that a daily struggle with our weaknesses will be the way in which we will become strong. I know that the struggle is real, and it is hard and it is heart-breaking and we all just want it to end. But there is strength in the struggle.
