For Such A Wad As I

Prior to now, I've always made my soaps with a vegetable base. My soap's been made from goat milk, coconut oil and olive oil. Now, I'm attempting to make it cheaper by using animal fat instead of coconut oil. I found myself humbled by walking into a butcher's shop, asking for a box of fat.

In order to make the fat suitable for soap-making, it must be rendered. To render it, I must put it over heat and boil it so that the impurities will separate from the pure fat. After the fat liquefies, it is then put through my filter to catch any tidbits that would likely rot the bar of soap or just make your bathing experience less pleasurable (impurities like sinew, veins, meat chunks, hair, etc).

Lifting the lid to my stock pot, sniffing the smell of burning fat, and watching this squishy mass of blubber melt, I contemplate that this nasty blob will soon serve to be an agent of cleansing. It's raw form bears no resemblance to it's finished product. The finished product will be creamy, smooth, sudsy, and smelling like a wonderful something-- lavender? rosemary? Anything but burning cow fat, right?

When I walked into the Kingdom of God, I was about as refined as a dirty hunk of beef suet. God didn't care. He humbles Himself daily to work with me--to refine me. Lifting the lid of His work in progress, I doubt I smell very good! Somehow, though, He finds the smell of my purification to be as sweet as incense, because He knows what I'm becoming. Perhaps, I'm becoming uglier and uglier all the time in the eyes of someone who doesn't know what God is up to with me. He knows. I sort of know. I know that in the end, I will not resemble the dirty wad of grossness that first came to the Throne asking to be made into something of use.

"Thanks be to God, who always leads us in triumphal procession in Christ and through us spreads everywhere the fragrance of the knowledge of him. For we are to God the aroma of Christ among those who are being saved and those who are perishing. To the one we are the smell of death; to the other, the fragrance of life." (2 Corinthians 2:14-16)

Do not worry of what others may think of you during your unpleasant refining process. Man looks at the outward, but God looks at the inward.

"Those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind." -Dr. Suess

Hallelujah to the King of Kings, who was and is and is to come. Praise Him for my uncomfortable, ugly refining process. All glory to Him for what I'm to be one day. Skim out my impurities, drain away my excess, mold me and make me beautiful and useful! Oh Lord, I trust you. You are the Author and Finisher of my faith. You will make beauty from my ashes, and the filthy rags of my righteousness will be burned up so you may adorn me as your Beloved.


"I will refine them like silver and test them like gold. They will call on my name and I will answer them; I will say, 'They are my people,' and they will say, 'The Lord is our God.'" (Zechariah 13:9)