In the Furnace of Affliction

Isaiah 48:10 Behold, I have refined thee, but not with silver; I have chosen thee in the furnace of affliction.

Sometimes this life seems like a furnace of affliction.

Yes, some more than others. Maybe for some it will come later, or maybe they aren’t God’s chosen and won’t be chastened, or refined.

Revelation 3:19

As many as I love, I rebuke and chasten: be zealous therefore, and repent.

While there is part of me that rejoices that perhaps it is because God is working in me is why things seem hard, yet there is part of me that is sort of pissed off about it all.

Hebrews 12:11

Now no chastening for the present seemeth to be joyous, but grievous: nevertheless afterward it yieldeth the peaceable fruit of righteousness unto them which are exercised thereby.

All the while, the world is going to shit, and it never seems we can do enough or break through to certain people, to change things for the better.

Really, we are limited in many things, yet in other things maybe we aren’t, yet we limit ourselves from our poor attitude, and this pisses me off too.

Understandably, there are many things (cares) that can make us angry, there are a million different injustices to just be pissed about.

Still, what good will it do to just be angry and feel helpless about all this crap?

I know God is love, I know God is working in me and those who love Him, those who love the truth. That’s why we are going through the furnace of affliction.

We are being refined and it doesn’t feel good.

I want to smoke tobacco, but it makes me feel like death. I want to use cannabis, but it makes me feel like shit. I want to do a lot of stupid things that don’t work.

God knows best, and he is showing me all the weaknesses in me, and it sucks.

This life is full of this testing it seems.

I used to be mad, saying, I didn’t ask to be born you know.

Still, on one hand I know life and this chance at eternal life is a gift, and on the other hand, I’m just a rotten carnal man flailing about, complaining and pissed off about something or another.

This world has no answers, only God has the answers.

The answer is to trust God, trust Jesus Christ.

Let Him work in me, let Him refine me in the furnace of affliction.

I can squirm about and try to avoid it, try to hide from it, yet in the end, it’s best just to trust God, that He is doing something I can’t quite understand.

I want to be closer to God, cause that is the only solution that makes sense after the futility of this world is seen through. After all the coping schemes come to naught.

Maybe we don’t understand it, yet let us trust it, let us get closer to God and find comfort in this process.

The closer we get to God, the farther we are from this vain world and its constant problems.

While there is so much I can’t do for others, I can ask God to do it and it’s His creation anyway. I’m just a small part of it all, a servant trying to be useful and usually finding himself a mess.

Better than ever and facing the furnace of affliction. It becomes a contradiction. The closer we get to God, the hotter it gets sometimes.

What did we expect?

God is trying to help us ultimately, get us ready for difficult things, make us stronger.

Yet our little brains are always thinking God is trying to make things harder for us for no reason.

There is a reason, God is love, and it will all be worth it.

So, let us trust God, let us repent from our sins, and let us continue to see clearly and honestly how this world and its false solutions are illusions and a waste of our time.

NewsBreak vs. Medium/30-day Comparison

February was the first month for me being monetized at NewsBreak and the second month for Medium. The results are in and they are drastically different. In this article, I’ll share the details and some thoughts about them. To make this easier with how both of these writing sites show stats, let’s compare the stats from Feb. 4 to March 4, or the last 30 days. NewsBreak Articles: 20 Views: 60k Likes: 1,104 Money made: $440 Medium Articles: 14 Views: 1,734 Claps: 124 Money made: $10.75 ----------------- Although my Medium account goes back to August 2018, I’ve only started seriously writing there since early Dec. 2022 (three months ago). I started writing at NewsBreak in late Dec. 2022. Here are some stats on my overall efforts at these platforms: NewsBreak Followers: 803 Articles: 44 Medium Followers: 417 Articles: 69 -------------- While I’m grateful for any money made on both platforms, the difference is fairly drastic. NewsBreak is a place where you can actually make decent money for ...

Writing Success Comes from Volume and Quality in Balance

Our success is up to us. Success, as a general term to describe the results that constitute a success in a writer’s mind, as it meets or exceeded our expectations. And volume is how many articles/content pieces it takes for each writer to succeed with various levels of quality involved. Each writer will have their personal goals and ways to measure the results achieved through writing an article. Each writer has differing perspectives on what constitutes quality with a finished product. With these important variables in mind, let’s explore how many articles it might take with a theoretical estimation based upon experience and what I’ve seen in my decades-long online writing journey. Most writers can’t expect to attract a lot of views when writing only one article a month, or 12 a year. They may be able to stay in the game at the base line level and maintain some trickle of income, yet it isn’t the volume needed to reach that level of success to maintain. Still, we must first appreciate...

The Orchestrated Mess

A short story about an amazing mess and the inevitable clean-up, as the show must go on. The Uncivil Mess of the Masses The people in the land were afraid of the future and what it would bring to them and their civilization. Even calling it a civilization was a stretch, considering the uncivil way many people were behaving within it. What most of the citizens and strangers in the land didn’t know was how everything was being orchestrated; the purpose of the orchestration was to create a certain amount of chaos from which order would then be applied. Like sanding and scrapping the old paint off a building and applying primer and new coats upon it for revitalization, the trillionaire elitists were working their plans into the societies beneath their illustrious purview. Most people couldn’t imagine having millions of dollars, much less billions or trillions at their disposal. The type of perceptions this brings of the world are much different than they could reasonably perceive, even amo...

Business and Society Articles

Search This Blog