Be glad about [the] trials you suffer. Their purpose is to prove that your faith is genuine. Even gold… is tested by fire; Wow! What a challenge!

Near Cripple Creek, Colorado, Telluride ore contains gold and tellurium. In the old days, less sophisticated refining methods couldn’t separate the two, so the ore was thrown away on the scrap heap.

But one day a miner mistook a lump of ore for coal and tossed it into his stove. In the strangest way, he’d struck it rich, because to his surprise, later he found beautiful beads of pure gold in the ashes of his stove. The heat had burned away the tellurium, leaving the gold in a purified state.

And for years, this precious substance had been thrown away, useless.I wonder how much you and I are like the telluride ore. God is inside us, but it invariably takes a “fiery trial” in the “stove of affliction” to bring it out of us.

Today on the streets of Skid Row there are little children whose entire lives have been spent in the furnace of poverty, homelessness, and hunger. Please help me show them how very special they are to our loving God. They aren’t trash. They aren’t a mistake.

Just a little love and lots of good food will show them that God really does care. God will bring out the real gold in their lives.

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