Streams in the Desert August 2 Daily Devotional

I will make all my mountains a way (Isa. 49:11).
God will make obstacles serve His purpose. We all have mountains in our lives. There are people and things that threaten to bar our
progress in the Divine life. Those heavy claims, that uncongenial occupation, that thorn in the flesh, that daily cross-we think that if only these were removed we might live purer, tenderer, holier lives; and often we pray for their removal.

"Oh, fools, and slow of heart!" These are the very conditions of
achievement they have been put into our lives as the means to the very graces and virtues for which we have been praying so long.
Thou has prayed for patience through long years, but there is
something that tries thee beyond endurance; thou hast fled from It
evaded It accounted it an unsurmountable obstacle to the desired
attainment and supposed that its removal would secure thy immediate deliverance and victory.
Not so! Thou wouldest gain only the cessation of temptations to impatience. But this would not be patience. Patience can be
acquired only through just such trials as now seem unbearable.
Go back; submit thyself. Claim to be a partaker in the patience of Jesus. Meet thy trials in Him. There is nothing in fife which
harasses and annoys that may not become subservient to the highest ends. They are His mountains. He puts them there. We know that God will not fail to keep His promise. "God understandeth the way
thereof and knoweth the place thereof. For he looketh to the ends
of the earth, and seeth under the whole heaven"; and when we come to the foot of the mountains, we
shall find the way. --Christ in Isaiah, by Meyer.
The meaning of trial is not only to test worthiness, but to
increase it; as the oak is not only tested by the storms, but toughened by them.