These trials are only to test your faith, to see whether or not it is strong and pure. It is being tested as fire tests gold and purifies it—and your faith is far more precious to God

than mere gold; so if your faith remains strong after being tried in the test tube of fiery trials, it will bring you much praise and glory and honor on the day of his return.

  1 Peter 1:7 (TLB)

I suspect that Heaven is filled with far more souls who suffered on earth than with souls who somehow skated through this life with few scars. Yet most of us still seem to be on a constant quest for easy, for comfortable, and for painless. When bad things happen, when life ends up looking far different than we had hoped or planned, it plunges us into deep, dark waters, knocks the wind right out of our lungs, and leaves us grasping for pieces of wreckage to cling to. We avoid pain but want holiness. We seek comfort but want humility. We want hearts of gold but hold tightly to our old selves and our old, impure hearts.

The most beautiful hearts on this earth aren’t the ones who have lived with the most ease; they are the ones with the biggest scars. They aren’t the ones who sought to avoid pain; they are the ones that walked right through the fires. They have lost children, battled cancer, lived with debilitating pain, lost friends on battlefields, or had plenty of nightmarish battles in their own minds. They survived extreme poverty, the cruelty of abuse, illegal imprisonment, or horrific natural disasters. But what all those scarred believers now understand is that their hope isn’t on earth; their hope is in Heaven. They know that hearts of gold are never formed in comfort; they are formed in the hottest fires as the impurities of life—selfishness, pride, greed, dishonesty, envy, and the rest—are burned right out of them. The shallow things that once mattered to them, that guided their daily decisions, are no longer the focus of their hearts. They have been refined, and what remains are hearts as pure as gold and as Heaven-focused as ever. 

Hearts of gold don’t come easily. Life is not always predictable and it is often very hard, but those unexpected, uninvited, and undesirable struggles are the ones that make you strong. Just as your muscles don’t grow strong without hard work or strength training, your heart can’t grow strong and be well-prepared for Heaven without spiritual strength training. Your heart may not be twenty-four-karat gold quite yet, but the more you lean into Jesus and surrender your quest for ease, the more He will purify your heart and burn all the impurities right out. If it can’t take the heat, it can’t become beautiful, polished, and pure. So when life takes a turn that leaves you sinking, don’t grasp and cling to the wreckage of this world; cling to the cross! It is the only thing that can save you! You are loved!