My brethren, count it all joy when ye fall into divers temptations; knowing this, that the trying of your faith worketh patience. But let patience have her perfect work, that ye may be perfect and entire, wanting nothing. (James 1:2-4)
The state of this world has had James 1 feeling less like a Sunday school lesson and more like a survival manual lately. There are many things, even several I’ve drafted posts about for the “Authenticity Unveiled” series but haven’t had clarity enough to feel comfortable posting, that feel like stones tied with ropes and draped over my shoulders. I ask myself, “How can so many be so willfully blind to what is actually going on here?” There is so much pressing in and down right now, and it weighs at every level: mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. Those of us who are deeply spiritually connected, whatever labels we give ourselves, have not been having an easy time.
There were moments this week where the weight of the world felt less like stones on my shoulders and more like water closing over my head. It was that particular kind of spiritual suffocation where you can still see the light above you but your limbs won’t cooperate and the surface keeps getting further away. I was close to blacking out, spiritually speaking. And I almost missed the very manual God left us for exactly this moment.
The Word of God tells us to rejoice in all things. It is not always easy to remember that, much less to do it. For the last several days, if that was the test from God, I have been failing it. I have not rejoiced in anything except a hot cup of coffee and closing my eyes at the end of the day to sleep, praying sleep would come. More than one night this week, it did not. But God was intent on reminding of this teaching, as you will see, and I am grateful that He did.
I have become sloppy and lazy in my writing, not organizing my drafts the way I normally do and more allowing them to pour out and land as they will, which makes them read like frustrated, confused, and weary rants more than deeply thought-out points with useful meaning. I have snapped at my dogs for breathing too loud. I have snapped at my husband for moving too slow. I have snapped at my laptop for not having a larger screen, as though that is the computer’s fault, or as though I couldn’t just enlarge the font. It’s ridiculous. Truly.
Last night I thought to myself, “This has to stop. You have to get control of yourself. You just posted about not letting feelings control you. Remember that. Step away. Breathe tomorrow.” I fully intended not to touch my computer or even my phone today, but this morning I find myself led to, “I can’t step away, because I need to share what happened next.” I pray it helps someone who may be experiencing something similar.
The Weight
Certain cultural and spiritual distractions swirling right now have had me pouring half-formed thoughts into drafts I haven’t been able to finish. Yesterday evening I logged on to X simply to share the verse of the day from my Bible app. After I posted 1 Corinthians 3:7 (“only God makes things grow”), the first thing I saw was a post from a woman named Renatta. She wrote about not letting “the alien files thing” pull people away from what truly matters: Christ and the Word of God.
Spoiler alert: He has used the last 24 hours to prove exactly that, through a chain of events that only make sense if He lined them up.
Renatta’s encouragement was simple and direct. “Don’t get distracted.” Noted. I need to work on that at a much broader level in my life right now, if I’m honest with myself. Feeling a bit more inspired, I scrolled down one more post. It was something else entirely, and from a friend of mine who often posts things as if she’s in my head when she writes them. If Renatta’s post had made me stop and think, the one immediately following felt like being punched in the chest. It revealed what the real weight had been all along.
The weight I was carrying wasn’t the individual things, the confusion or the chaos. It was something deeper. It was watching people be utterly blind to, and blasphemous of, the thing I cherish most: righteousness. Jesus. Grace. Salvation. The kind of depth this world is starving for and refusing to accept. And for many who do claim to believe, this last week revealed just how few actually do. Heavy times.
The enemy attacks purpose with empty promises. The world offers escape through distractions. Jesus offers peace through restoration. Remember who you belong to when the night gets loud.
And I burst into tears. This was exactly where I was sitting. I commented on that post, which I rarely do anywhere anymore. I let my vulnerability show:
Lord, this week has been really tough. Old battles I thought were behind me have resurfaced right in the middle of the progress I’ve been making. The past reappeared at the most random and inopportune time. My heart feels heavy as I watch the world implode in callousness and selfishness, while I’m trying to stay wise, humble, and kind. I’m standing only by God’s grace and promises. Praying for anyone else fighting similar battles right now.
This morning, when I logged back in, several had liked that comment. But there was only one reply. And it was hard to swallow, even though it was exactly what I needed to hear. It said:
Consider it all joy… All suffering in the life of the believer has its purpose in God. The crucible for silver and the furnace for gold…
If that wasn’t God pushing my buttons, I can’t tell you what was. Those words woke something in me, but at first they felt like more heaviness, not comfort.
Bittersweet Wisdom
Those words were my mother’s words. She gave them to me as advice more than once. Often, actually… and every single time, they landed with more weight than comfort, not because she was wrong, but because there was an unspoken judgment attached. There was an expectation that you should already be there, already rejoicing, already refined. My mother was fierce in her love. Sometimes so fierce that her mothering felt less like a warm embrace and more like a mandate. She didn’t mean for it to land that way. She didn’t fully realize her own energy. I say that with love, and also with the self-awareness that I carry the same tendency, especially with those I love most deeply.
She has been gone five, six years this year, and only now do I understand what she was trying to give me. That’s its own particular ache, isn’t it? To finally understand someone only after you’ve lost the chance to tell them so. To wish you could go back, not to change everything, just to say: I get it now. I see you now. And what does it cost me to carry her words today? Bittersweet wisdom.
So, seeing them there, on the screen from a complete stranger? Maybe that’s what it took for me to receive them statically, as they were, with no judgment or preconception attached, and to cement them in my spirit as they needed to exist there. Alas, it was a powerful moment, and yes – I believe it was God’s work, if not also my mother’s, in spirit. I can imagine her looking over me as I type this, with a sarcastic half grin on her face. Some lessons can only reach us when they come without the weight of history attached.
Why am I sharing all of this vulnerable, personal experience and feeling and imbalance with you? Because I want you to understand what I have come to understand. I want you to understand what James actually meant in his instruction/survival manual for times like these. “Count it all joy” can feel like a slap in the face when you’re in the middle of something heavy, as I experienced so many times. It can sound like toxic positivity, like someone telling you to smile through suffering. In reality, that is not even close to what James was saying.
What James Actually Meant
The word translated “count” or “consider” in the original Greek is hēgeomai. It means a deliberate, reasoned decision. It means a choice of the will. James wasn’t telling you to feel happy about hard things. He was telling you to decide how you’re going to receive them. That is a profoundly different instruction. It means the joy he’s describing isn’t an emotion that arrives on its own. It’s a posture you choose, even when everything in you resists it, which takes me back to a previous post I shared about being Spirit-led versus emotion-led. This portion of Scripture is key to that study and I should have included it there, but didn’t.
Why does that choice matter so much? Because James tells us exactly what the trying of our faith produces: hupomone. Hupomone is translated as patience, but the word carries more weight than that. It means steadfast endurance. The ability to remain under pressure without collapsing. It’s not passive waiting, but active, rooted, deliberate holding of your ground. The furnace isn’t punishment, it is formation. The crucible isn’t meant to destroy the silver, it’s meant to surface everything that isn’t silver, so that what remains is pure.
That’s the goal James points to: teleios. Complete. Whole. Mature. Lacking nothing. Not perfection in the sense of flawlessness, but wholeness in the sense of nothing missing, nothing broken off, nothing left undeveloped. God is not trying to break you in the fire. He is trying to finish you.
But how do you actually do this when you’re snapping at your dogs and your husband and your laptop, when sleep won’t come and the world feels like it’s coming apart at the seams? How do you choose joy as an act of will when your will feels exhausted?
Put It On a Page
You start small. You start honest. You start by recognizing that it’s a problem for you, and then putting it on the page. I don’t mean that in a vague, motivational sense. I mean it practically and personally, and I’m speaking it to you from learned experience. In fact, it was in recognizing that it was a problem for me, and beginning to write it all out privately, in journal fragments and half-formed sentences, that I found my way to this post.
Writing is how I find the shape of things. It is not just a need for me but a requirement for stability. It is my gift and, I believe, part of my purpose. I used to stay frustrated because how was I going to use it to help anyone else, especially in my day to day life, when they couldn’t understand me and didn’t want to hear what my “gift” had to offer them? I’ve come to understand that people need me to humble my ego, and to use and share this gift, precisely because they cannot do it themselves.
The ones who most need someone to help them find clarity are the ones who cannot see the shape of things when they’re inside the chaos. That is not a flaw in them. That is why we need each other. But in order to help each other – in order to help someone else – we have to first understand and be stable and aware of ourselves.
Writing is a good way to begin to understand and ground ourselves, even spiritually. It allows an escape for what we carry in the mind, even if we never share it with anyone else. No one else is the ultimate target. The most important audience is always ourselves first, otherwise whatever we do share openly with others lands more like lecturing than sharing. If any of this makes you tense up or get nervous or want to run away quickly because you think you can’t write, or you hate writing, please just take a breath and consider what I’m saying.
You don’t have to be a writer to write. Write sloppily. Write in fragments. Write the confusion and the questions and the fear. Write the things you can’t say out loud. Write the prayers you don’t know how to pray yet. In the field of psychology we encouraged it. In spiritual direction we encourage it. Every form of art teaches it. Even a nonsense brain dump, even a page of scribbled frustration, begins to move something that was stuck. Writing is possibly the first step toward solving any problem, because it forces you to identify, to sort, to begin making something out of nothing.
That is, after all, what God did in the beginning, and He is still doing it. Even now. Even in you.
Closing Thoughts
The furnace is not a sign that God has forgotten you. It is a sign that He is still working on you, and that is, if we can receive it rightly, reason for joy. Not the giddy, circumstantial kind or the kind that pretends everything is fine, but the deep, settled, spirit-anchored kind that says, “I know who holds me, I know what this is for, and I know how it ends.”
That is what James was pointing to. That is what my mother was trying to give me all those years ago. That is what a stranger on the internet handed back to me this morning through four words and a metaphor about silver and gold.
Consider it all joy.
Not because the weight isn’t real. It is. Not because the world isn’t heavy. It is. But because the One who called you into the furnace has never once lost sight of you inside it, and He does not intend to leave you there unfinished.
If you want to go deeper on the difference between being led by your emotions and being led by the Spirit in the middle of trials like these, I would encourage you to read the post I shared recently about that (What Hard Seasons and Scripture Taught Me About Feelings | Daily Bread), because counting it all joy is not an emotional exercise. It never was. It is a spiritual one.
A Closing Prayer
Lord, thank You for the furnace, even when we don’t understand it. Thank You for the strangers You send, the words You resurrect, and the grace that meets us in our most exhausted and undone moments. Help us to choose the posture of joy even when the feeling won’t come. Refine us. Finish us. We trust You with the fire. Amen.
Twin Tree Project 