Threshed

I have been thinking alot about the threshing floor.  The threshing floor is where the grain is separated from the chaff by pounding or by oxen pulling a cart over it. John the Baptist used this process to describe what Jesus would do when He came. (Matthew 3:12) It doesn't paint a pleasant picture but it's were I am right now. He has set me on a journey to strange places (and I am not totally refering to the move), he is asking me to go places I don't know, release long held beliefs, live in a dependence that is foreign to me. In short, it has been a painful process at times.
Spent sometime looking up at how it God used it in the Old Testament.  There are many references and I would love to talk about all of them but that's not what I have been thinking about. 
I read a verse in Isaiah that was new to me this week and has given me comfort-"Caraway is not threshed with a sledge, nor is a cartwheel rolled over cummin; caraway is beaten out with a rod, and cummin with a stick. Grain must be ground to make bread;  so one does not go on threshing it forever.   Though he drives the wheels of his threshing cart over it, his horses do not grind it."  (Isaiah 28:27-28) What that means is that first of all we are not all threshed the same way.  Hallelujah!    It means that God knows we are individuals and he doesn't just thresh and press us just for the sake of doing it.  It means He has a unique and special plan for us.  It has an ultimate purpose and "it doesn't go on forever."  It is not a beating or a discipline.  It is God's way of getting rid of the bad and bringing out the best in us. 
What I always remember about the threshing floor itself occurs in 2 Samuel 24:18-25.  David needs to build an altar to stop a plague that is killing his people.  The worst of it is that the people were stricken because of something David had done.  Not them.  So God told him were to go, what to buy and to build an altar.  So he bought a threshing floor and there he built an altar. And he made the sacrifices and the plague stopped.  That's the short version.  I wonder at the time if David wondered "Why a threshing floor?"  But God is cool like that because in that spot is where God told David's son Solomon to build His temple. 
I love the connection.  From that painful place, He is building a beautiful dwelling place for Himself in me too.  My task is to to keep making those sacrifices to Him, to keep giving Him praise.  To offer back to Him what He has done in me. 
This has given me hope and I am able to more joyfully accept the place where I am. 
in Christ,
joy