Every Friday I join a community of bloggers for Five Minute Friday. One word prompt, five minutes. Unedited. The prompt this week is … Pressure.

Pressure … it’s defined as “the exertion of force upon an object.”

Life is filled with pressure of various sorts and degrees each day. Some sorts are hardly felt at all as we can easily process through them. Others can be felt with such force, we hardly know how we will bear up under them.

And yet, here we are, day after day – still standing.

The pressures are good for us in some mysterious way. Somehow each layer of pressure adds to our lives, proving to us there was a strength in us we never knew. Instead of diminishing us, pressure adds into our lives, we become increased.

These daily pressures not only make us a little stronger but they give us stamina, the energy and drive to keep on, to press forward. They bring into our lives a little more love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

One might say through the pressures of life, our lives become more fruitful. These pressure change us, mold us, and never leave us quite the same.

We grow under pressure.
But then, perhaps that is their very purpose.

“Beloved, now we are children of God, and it has not appeared as yet what we will be. We know that when He appears, we will be like Him, because we will see Him just as He is.”
(1 John 3:2, NASB)

*** I wrote this post earlier this morning but just now read from my devotional book, Streams in the Desert. I love when God works this way and I hope this reading blesses someone today …

ll these things are against me  (Gen. 42:36).

All things work together for good to them that love God (Rom. 8:28).

Many people are wanting power. Now how is power produced? The other day we passed the great works where the trolley engines are supplied with electricity. We heard the hum and roar of the countless wheels, and we asked our friend, “How do they make the power?”

“Why,” he said, “just by the revolution of those wheels and the friction they produce. The rubbing creates the electric current.”

And so, when God wants to bring more power into your life, He brings more pressure. He is generating spiritual force by hard rubbing. Some do not like it and try to run away from the pressure, instead of getting the power and using it to rise above the painful causes.

Opposition is essential to a true equilibrium of forces. The centripetal and centrifugal forces acting in opposition to each other keep our planet in her orbit. The one propelling, and the other repelling, so act and re-act, that instead of sweeping off into space in a pathway of desolation, she pursues her even orbit around her solar centre.

So God guides our lives. It is not enough to have an impelling force–we need just as much a repelling force, and so He holds us back by the testing ordeals of life, by the pressure of temptation and trial, by the things that seem against us, but really are furthering our way and establishing our goings.

Let us thank Him for both, let us take the weights as well as the wings, and thus divinely impelled, let us press on with faith and patience in our high and heavenly calling.
–A. B. Simpson

In a factory building there are wheels and gearings,
There are cranks and pulleys, beltings tight or slack–
Some are whirling swiftly, some are turning slowly,
Some are thrusting forward, some are pulling back;
Some are smooth and silent, some are rough and noisy,
Pounding, rattling, clanking, moving with a jerk;
In a wild confusion in a seeming chaos,
Lifting, pushing, driving–but they do their work.
From the mightiest lever to the tiniest pinion,
All things move together for the purpose planned;
And behind the working is a mind controlling,
And a force directing, and a guiding hand.
So all things are working for the Lord’s beloved;
Some things might be hurtful if alone they stood;
Some might seem to hinder; some might draw us backward;
But they work together, and they work for good,
All the thwarted longings, all the stern denials,
All the contradictions, hard to understand.
And the force that holds them, speeds them and retards them,
Stops and starts and guides them–is our Father’s hand.
–Annie Johnson Flint

(from Streams in the Desert, April 9, page 149. Copied and pasted for ease though from Crosswalk.

Image by Free-Photos from Pixabay
Today I am joining … Five Minute Friday and Faith On Fire and Grace & Truth .