THE WALKING STICK

Think of it! 400 years from Abraham to Moses! Twenty generations of abject slavery.

Each generation grew up making bricks for their masters. A child born, broken to work, labored in the brick yards until he or she, boy or girl, either grew into premature age or died of exhaustion.

400 years of this. Birthing, laboring and dying. Birthing, laboring and dying.

How many sons, how many fathers, how many grandfathers and great grandfathers wondered what had happened to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob? How long could they be expected to endure this?

So it is, says noted author Calvin Miller, that all real saints are fashioned in the crucible of God. They are broken -- even crushed -- between mortar and pestle; their softness changed to granite, from which God fashions monuments of magnificence.

Thus, a Jew of Tarsus was beaten, stoned, shipwrecked, and imprisoned; yet he speaks out in praise of the brokenness that forged him! He boasts of his weakness and praises the storms.