Under Pressure

"But he knows the way that I take; when he has tested me, I will come forth as gold."

Job 23:10

When the going gets tough, it can be really easy to want to give up, give in or just find some seemingly impossible way to find a little peace –

When peace won’t come, it can help if you think of peace in another form.

One of the brightest, toughest and most beautiful things to ever grace our planet started out as a little “piece” of carbon.

This carbon isn’t pretty.

It isn’t anything special.

It doesn’t feel good.

In fact, if you do touch it, you are instantly left covered in soot…

But that’s just it. We look at carbon and see the carbon.

God looks at carbon and calls it “diamond.”

This horrible, messy, ugly, dark thing that you are smack in the middle of right now, the pressure that presses in from every side, your shortcomings, your failings, your worst day ever…

It all has the potential to become your greatest hope.

Jesus came to bear the weight of every circumstance, every sin, every guilt-laden conscience, every battle, every secret, every trial, every heartbreak, every “not enough” upon the cross for all to see.

What pressure our Savior must have been feeling as He felt the weight of all those burdens, all the guilt that did not belong to Him, - feeling it, touching it, breathing it, and still in all that pressure…

Victory.

Jesus is a lot like a diamond that reversed the process. He become carbon for us so that even though we fall into the horrible, the messy, the ugly and the dark, we could know without a shadow of a doubt that God cares enough to make us diamonds.

The next time you see a diamond sparkling on someone’s finger or glistening in a corner shop, remember that it is just a piece of carbon that withstood a lot of pressure to become something spectacular.