Phoenix Rising

According to The New International Webster’s Comprehensive Dictionary of the English Language, the phoenix was a bird of great beauty, which was supposed to live 500 or 600 years in the Arabian Desert and then consume itself by fire, rising again from its ashes young and beautiful to live through another cycle. The phoenix was a symbol of immortality for several cultures, and as I think about it, I identify with the phoenix. As a believer in Jesus Christ as the way to know God, I believe that there is eternal substance to my being, but even more than that, in my life I have come upon troubles and difficulties which have been as fire to my soul.
I am a graduate student in Human Development and Family Studies, which is a cross between psychology and sociology (quick explanation), and is not to be confused with clinical psychology. When I leave my program I am supposed to be a qualitatively different person than I was when I arrived. I am supposed to have skills and knowledge that I did not have upon entering my graduate program. Through my course work and my internship, which is commonly called an assistantship, I am run over the coals, as a sort of trial by fire to teach me all I can in, what seems to be the shortest period of time possible. It is very difficult. One semester I was in two classes, and a grant writing seminar, while also holding an assistantship which required about 20 hours of my week, plus I had to find time to work on my thesis. I have since learned to downsize my aspirations for each semester, but the whole point is to make me something that I did not used to be—college professor material.
It is the same way with the Christian walk…or at last it has been for me. It seems that I go for a while not necessarily complacent, but not exactly challenged either, and then something happens that I did not expect or wasn’t according to my plan. Whatever my aspirations were became the heap of ashes that I am sitting in, surrounded by a dense fog of smoke. During these times I turn to God for answers, turn to the Holy Spirit for guidance, and find some new part of me that was hidden, that was walled off, and would not have been found if the fire had never started. Peter writes in his first letter, that trials come “so that your faith – of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire – may be proved genuine and may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed.” Gold is purified by flames, which first reveal the impurities that float to the top of the liquefied gold, and then incinerates these impurities. As much as I know trials are for my good, I can’t say I enjoy the whole experience of the flames. And yet, I have learned so much about myself and my God just by letting the flames consume the unnecessary pride and insecurity of my life, and allowing Father to show me the redecorating He has done with my heart. And just as the phoenix rises from the flames a new bird, so I also become a new person, stepping even closer to that person that God desires me to be.