A few nights ago while trying to fall asleep, I began to meditate on the words of the song "Refiner's Fire." I chose it because I wanted to rid my mind of the unneeded baggage of the day and just be ready to start fresh in the morning.
Purify my heart,
let me be as gold and precious silver.
Purify my heart,
let me be as gold, pure gold.
Refiner's fire,
my heart's one desire
is to be…holy;
set apart for You, Lord.
I choose to be…holy;
set apart for You,
my Master,
ready to do Your will.
Purify my heart,
cleanse me from within
and make me holy.
Purify my heart,
cleanse me from my sin, deep within.
But as I was thinking about the words, I realized that it's not the gentle song that it seems at first. By the melody it's soothing, but I don' t know if going through a refining fire is so easy. Surely it's hard, although the prospect of becoming pure and holy is comforting.
It's like that song, "take me into the Holy of Holies....take the coal, cleanse my lips, here I am." Also sung to a slow tempo, but...Ouch! Getting touched with a hot coal? There are a lot of worship songs that have a pretty weak meaning, but here are two that are the opposite: they sound slow and gentle, but have some words that are quite powerful if put into practice. Be careful what you pray/sing about!
Thankfully, the promises outweigh the painful processes that we might have to endure.
I did get to sleep a little earlier that night.
P.S. I didn't bother to look up authors of these songs. Sorry!
EURO 2008
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Yes; that whole image is rather terrifying, isn't it? I was actually just thinking about that myself the other day - in our church we have a song with the lines..."like gold that's tested in fire".... I got completely distracted from Mass as for some reason it was suddenly interesting to me to meditate about which aspects of my life are the gold and which would be burned away...
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