Square Bamboo
Theme of the Week: Strategic Struggle
Nelson Annan
Thursday, August 12, 2004
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Key Bible Verse: These trials … test your faith, to show that it is strong … as fire tests and purifies gold (1 Peter 1:7a). Bonus Reading:1 Peter 1:7b ; 4:12—13 ; 5:9—11
Most bamboo is round, inexpensive, and used for construction or basic tools. But in Japan, square bamboo is expensive, and highly prized for interior decorating.
To produce square bamboo, a farmer clamps two L-shaped pieces of wood tightly around the young stalks he chooses. As it sprouts to its full height with nowhere else to expand, the bamboo presses into the mold, experiencing a painful limitation of what it would naturally be.
What's more, to give the surface of the bamboo an unusual, irregular design, the farmer places a mixture of acid and mud inside the mold before clamping it around the bamboo. If that suffering bamboo could talk, how bitterly it would complain about the farmer's method as it compares itself to the free-growing bamboo around it! But when the process is finished and the bamboo is cut down, it has turned into a beautiful, valuable surprise.
How God is working in your life right now may seem unnatural and painful. But the God of surprises is creating something ultimately beautiful and precious in your life. Trust Him with the outcome.
—Nelson Annan in Interest magazine
Adapted from Interest magazine (9/92) by permission.
My Response: Instead of whining about being singled out to suffer, I'll thank God for the outcome He has in mind.
Thought to Apply: I owe more to the fire and hammer and the file than to anything else in my Lord's workshop.
—Charles Spurgeon (English preacher)
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You have granted me many blessings; now let me also accept what is hard from Your hand. —Dietrich Bonhoeffer
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