Sanctification School

I've been reading "Girl Meets God" and I finally finished it. My favourite thing about this book is that as I read through it I come across these really simple, yet profound things! In this one chapter, titled "Sanctification School" she starts talking about her jealousy of her friend who is married and having a baby. One of the things (aside from the family and the relationship) that she is jealous about is how she sees God refining her friend through the relationship, that the marriage is a school for sanctification. She says "I have watched their marriage and I have seen that God has been who He said He would be. 'He will be like a refiner's fire or a launderer's soap. He will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver; He will purify the Levites and refine them like gold and silver.' He has used their marriage as soap. I praise God for His soapiness, and then I get so jealous that I think I might literally start to see green. It is the old question, the pathetic question: Why them, Lord/ Why them and not me?"

The chapter continues with Lauren describing how she is trying to imagine herself being happy for her friend when the baby comes, being genuinely happy! "Sitting on my bed, I tell God bluntly that I don't have the resources to watch Hannah have this baby. 'I really don't want to feel this way,' I say, 'I really want t do right by my friend. But I don't know how to be a friend here, God....You are going to have to give me the eyes to do it with.' If I am going to do something other than crumple up and collapse, it will only be because God does it for me. Because He will gently pry me apart and prop me upright right after I have crumpled into a ball on the floor."

"Somehow I know he will uncrumple me. I will be jealous and miserable all through this pregnancy, but I have known God long enough to now know that He will give me enough respite from my jealousy to go to Baby Gap....if I ask for that respite and open my hands to receive it, He will give it to me. He will give me enough peace to be her friend. And, knowing God, He might even surprise me. He might give me, amid the months of envy, a few moments of gratitude and joy. He might give me a little burst of affection and edxcitement when I first see that downy bundle of pink."

And the most important part...

"Later, in the shower, I get it. I get that Hannah's pregnancy is my own school of sanctification. God is sactifying my friends through marriage and parenthood, but He is not just blessing them and leaving me out in the unblessed cold. He is using my rediculous jealousy and my endless self-pity to sanctify me."