I’ve done few things as cathartic, challenging, and frustrating as blacksmithing.
In its rawest element, it so closely resembles the human condition and life’s respective course, it instills a reverence for the sacred, the collision between the creator and the created.
There have been so many times in my life when the fires are burning around me, to the point it seems the very grain structure holding my being together is being altered. What’s inside me expands under the intense flames and rush of hot air. Just as it becomes unbearable, I am ripped from the forge; set upon the level face of an unmoving, immortal anvil; and hammered. With each blow contents are either removed, relocated, or reset.
What was becomes something else. Something that is becoming. At last, the grip and the hammer of the master craftsman have drawn out the unseen potential. A new life. A new creation.
The anvil is still the same — its face perfect and sure, despite innumerable blows.
The hammer that hit so hard is no longer an instrument of destructive punishment, but a tool of designation, forming the completed masterpiece: A life fully as it was intended — formed under forge, friction, and foreknowledge.
The trials you have in this life — the pain, the heartache, the tragedy, the hits, the fire … there is a process. Each process will be different. In these times, as hard as it may be, ask yourself, “What is this working out of me?” And choose to believe that the process of pain has a purpose, that there is grace upon grace to be as you were truly intended.
This may not be as you have planned — or as you’ve been told — but as you were intended.
There is a master Craftsman who understands and is intimately invested in you — you, a sacred life created from the rawest of elements. To others such elemental things may hold no value. Such thoughts may be reduced to delusion and the imaginations of fools.
However, to the Maker who sees the end from the beginning, your value is worth every tear drop, every frustration, every drop of His own shed blood.z
Originally posted on IG
