If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen!

A strange saying indeed. One that had in many ways become my justification to alot of my running from problems in life.

You see, by nature I am someone always looking for the exit signs. You know the sort of people (and I'm talking in a completely metaphorical way here) that before they even walk into a situation they check if the exit signs are visible.

That saying "if you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen" has rung true for me over the years. For me, the suggestion of running before you get burned was one that I took on with most circumstances I found myself in. As long as I felt justified in "getting out" I thought merely of any consequences to my actions.

What this 'saying' does not express about human nature however is that it is us ourselves that create the heat! So in essence as humans, we spend alot of our time running from the very problems we create for ourselves! And somehow because the world tells us that it's ok to bail on something that doesn't work out, we fool ourselves into a false sense of security that we are not to blame for our own misgivings, and that once we remove ourselves out of the equasion that somehow the equasion altogether dissapears . This saying, however much a throw away line encaptulates so much about our behaviour as people in todays society. Have we lost all of our ability to stick at something no matter what it takes? Have we allowed ourselves to detour the greatest hurdles just for the sake of taking the easy way out?

You may think I'm waffling on about nothing but I do have a point! The point is that for much of my life I have opperated within this saying. I have spent much of the last ten years running from the heat my lifestyle had created. I had lied and cheated my way in and out of things as if it was of no consequence. I had made my bed many times and refused to lay in it. But, and there is a but, life caught up with me. It has definately caught up with me! It got to a point where running from the heat was no longer optional because my whole exsistence lay within it.

What the world didn't fill me in on was that this is not a bad thing. It's ok to put up with the heat if it means conquering a mountain in your life or even just to have that self gratifying feeling of achievement that we all crave. Our world encourages us to take the easy way out but I beg to differ. There is no joy in piking out. There is no character building in comprimise. There is no future in the roaming, only in the journey, And most of all, God does not reside in the luke warm.

At first after becoming a mum, I sweated at the thought of having to stick at something for the good of another. Now I realise that God had to use that as a way to make me take the heat. For it is only through the heat of life that God can refine us into the people he wants us to be.


Isaiah 48:10 (New International Version)

See, I have refined you, though not as silver;
I have tested you in the furnace of affliction.