Devotionals

Pliability

by Anne Adams
03/24/25
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…When you walk through the fire, you will not be scorched,
Nor will the flame burn you. Isaiah 43:2b  (NASB)

Once years ago to help a friend, I took her child to an optometrist so he could fit her new glasses. First the doctor put them on the child to see if they fit, then he took them off and then removed them saying they still needed some adjustments. He dipped the ear pieces into a small glass container that was half full of some kind of a powdery substance. Taking the glasses out he then worked with the earpieces a bit and put the glasses back on. They now fit and we got ready to leave.

I then asked him what he’d done, and he said that by dipping the glasses in the hot salt in the container it warmed them up so the plastic would then soften to become pliable enough so  he could form them into the right fit for the child.   

Sometimes it happens like that in our spiritual lives when we may experience a sort of softening heat that comes from our struggles and we become pliable in God’s hands so we can follow His plans for us.  What happens is that when we have a problem we learn to trust the Lord to help us, and that usually makes us ready to trust him further when presented with other new challenges.  After all, like the earpieces in salt become pliable, the problems may make us pliable to recognize His help as He gives it and then trust Him to keep doing it as we continue to follow Him.

Yet as our passage tells us, if God needs to use heat to make us pliable – like the old hymn puts it: “The flame will not harm thee, I only design, thy dross to consume, thy gold to refine.”

Come to think of it - how pliable am I?