Diamonds out of Dust
My fascination with diamonds is not that of the “typical” girl. They say diamonds are a girl’s best friend. While I’ll let you decide which side of that argument you stand on, my affinity for diamonds is much more personal then have some “bling” to parade around. In an earlier post I made mention of these facts and I’m sure you will see this topic throughout many of my posts. However, it amazes me that even though I love my middle name and, by the leading of The Lord, developed a ministry and career from it, there was a time when my middle name held little significance to me.
Travel back in time with me 15 years. Make your way to the gloomy green, brick building of an elementary school; round the corner from the front door; climb the darkened stairwell; and just as you see the light of the hallway, duck into the first room on the left. There you might just find a group of first graders. These little guys went to school all day, unlike the ½ day first graders, but they didn’t mind a bit. You see, they had the best teacher in the school, Mrs. B. She taught them while doing hand stands against the wall, awarded them by doing cartwheels down the hallway if they all made A’s on the spelling test, and created new games every week to keep them engaged in learning.
Now that you know this, you won’t be surprised by what you see. Are you ready? Let’s check out the class. Okay, Mrs. B is doing jumping jacks and kids are scattered around the room. Ahh! It’s spelling time and that means its game time. Where is she at? Do you see her? She has red hair, freckles, and I think she’s wearing… oh, there she is! Look to your right and you will see a group of girls working hard to memorize their words for the week. Okay a couple of easy words: fish, race, diamond… DIAMOND!?!... I thought these were easy words.
That’s what 7-year-old me thought as everyone wrote down how they thought it was spelled. Diemond…Dimund…Dymond…all wrong. Then it happened, that moment you want to sink into the ground, the first moment of judgement. I can hear it like it was yesterday, “Did we get it right?” “I don’t know, Brittney, you tell us, it’s your middle name.” It was my middle name and I didn’t know, so I shrugged my shoulders. “You don’t know how to spell your own name?” I was embarrassed; I had never thought about my middle name, it didn’t mean anything to me. Now, it is my story, my being, my motivation.
Recently, others have referenced the metaphor of the diamond and I have been glued to Hawk Nelson’s new song, “Diamonds.” The idea is that what go through, the good and the bad, is refining us into the priceless masterpiece God has designed. “He’s making diamonds out of dust, He’s making diamonds out of us.”
Those lyrics are so powerful. If we could live with the understanding God never fails and He holds our future, then we could live a liberated life. It’s not easy, I know because I struggle every day to see myself as God sees me. When I look in the mirror, I see dust. I see ashes of a life charred by the pain of this world, but my God makes beauty from ashes!
The past few days I have taken my anthem from the lyrics of their song: “I’ll surrender to the power of being crushed by love, ‘til the beauty that was hidden isn’t covered up. Oh it’s not what I hoped for, it’s something much better.”
Where would I be if God gave me what I asked for, when I asked for it? How many heartaches would I have to overcome if it all went the way I thought it should? How many times would I have crumbled under the pressure of this world, if my merciful God had not prepared me by refining and strengthening me through trials?
I will leave you with a quote I have written on the wall in my room. Every morning I wake up and when I think of the struggles ahead, I tell myself, “You’re a Diamond, dear, they can’t break you!”
