Count it all joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. James 1:2-3 NIV

Who doesn’t want joy? From a thousand book titles to the theme of a million Christmas cards, the word joy beckons us towards this seemingly elusive feeling. But the Bible’s concept of joy, is not a feeling that comes and goes in our lives, but a command to embrace just as we embrace our children, on both their good days and bad. But the Bible doesn’t ask us to blindly jump up and down when things go awry. Today’s verse gives us tells us that we can rejoice because trial teach us perseverance. I am reminded of when, as a teenager, I worked in a factory that producing copper tubing. When the tubing first arrived, it came in 5-inch diameter, thick-walled tubes, each one being almost 20 feet in length. Our job was to take those rough tubes and extrude them into much smaller precisely manufactured pieces. But first, the copper had to be annealed. Annealing is a process of rapidly heating the copper in a furnace and then immersing it in cold water. Without annealing, the copper remained hard and impossible for us to work with. But once the annealing was completed, the tubes were softened, so we could they could be extruded into the various sizes our customers needed.

Trials are what God uses to anneal our character. Before facing trials, most of us are too overconfident and proud of our own abilities for God to use us to serve others. But I have found that He is an expert at using circumstances to heat up my world, and then just as things seem unbearably hot, He turns things around plunges me into cold water. When the shock of these changes wears off and I turn to God for help, I discover that though my situation has not altered, somehow, miraculously, God has changed my own heart. The desires, dreams and goals I held so tightly to earlier now have been replaced by His and a peace, greater than I can understand. Then I realize that God has got me right where I belong, and a joy, that no one can take away settles in my soul.