1 Peter 1:6-8

From Peter the Disciple.

To the Exiles.

You rejoice, exile, in the new life and the living hope that God has given. You rejoice in the inheritance waiting in heaven for you. The end of the road is leading somewhere good. Good beyond imagining. The happy ending of all happy endings.

But how do you get there? How do you walk day by day along the road through the minutes and hours of your exile?

In the end there might be joy. In the moment there is fear. Uncertainty. Anxiety. Panic. An exile asks, “When will it end?” “What will happen to me?” When you are in exile you are cut off from something important and life-giving: A home, maybe. A group. A person. A purpose. There are tears.

Many difficulties arise in exile. In the moments of day-to-day life—washing the dishes, putting on clothes, stopped at a traffic light—you can be hit by sudden memories, bringing up feelings of longing or guilt or sadness. Your eyes glaze over, and you are not where you are, but you are where you were, or where you wish you were. 

You bear the weight of that longing or grief, and it makes your hands heavy as they lift plates into the dishwasher. It makes the colors of your clothes fade so that you cannot choose what to wear. It lifts your foot off the gas pedal, so the car drives more slowly and aimlessly, because are you really going anywhere at all?

And then at times you see a decision in front of you: to do this, or that? To come or to go? To work or to rest? And in the moment, the fear closes you in pressing on both sides like a vise, squeezing, driving, narrowing the whole world into this one moment, in which you must do the right thing (if you could only have the wisdom to know what that is and the courage to carry it out), or you and everyone will perish.

To the exiles, you are grieved by various trials. The difficulties of circumstance that bring inconvenience or suffering. The difficulties of the heart that color every view and often seep enjoyment out of life.

It is only a little while. Do you know, that when the end comes, you will look back on these days and months and years as if they were a passing dream?  Not only that, but the trials you endure, the suffering that makes you cry, is making something wonderful.

Your faith. Believing without seeing. Your faith is more precious than gold. Think of the weight of gold. Think of how it shines. How it has value to build, to buy, to give. You have that gold—but better than gold. It is inside of you, the faith that cries out in desperation to a God you cannot see. The faith that steps with courage out into the unknown. The faith that lies back and rests knowing that there is a Father there to hold you.

Your faith is being sanded down, purified, compressed, shined up, cut like a diamond—it is already sparkling through the darkness, and just wait until you see the brilliance when it is all done.

And in the end, when Jesus is revealed once and for all to every person on earth, he’s going to take that diamond that is your faith, and he will hold it up for everyone to see, and they will exclaim and admire and feel the great worth of your faith.

The exile is making that faith. Day by day as you go through the suffering, it is building and revealing that faith. Even on the days when you break down and it feels like you have no faith at all, those are the very days that you will look back on in the end and say, “There. That was the most valuable time. That made something beautiful.”

1 Peter 1:6-8 In this you rejoice, though now for a little while, if necessary, you have been grieved by various trials, 7 so that the tested genuineness of your faith-more precious than gold that perishes though it is tested by fire-may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ.