It's About the Process

Earlier today we had a sinkful of tomatoes. Tonight, 10 quarts of spaghetti sauce sit cooling on our kitchen table, all because of a process called canning.

We've come to really enjoy the process of planting and growing seeds, harvesting produce, and creating something for later meals through canning or freezing. But the process is a lot of work! And it requires forethought: a sinkful of tomatoes might become salsa, or spaghetti, or plain diced tomatoes -- but we have to know when we start working on them what they will become, so we can follow the correct process.

The process is different for sweet pickles or dills. Some produce requires additional steps to guarantee safe preserving. Some items - like watermelon - just have to be eaten fresh; the process of canning would ruin the fruit.

I love eating canned items well into the winter. I enjoy seeing the finished product. But what I love most is the process - seeing something through from beginning to end, from seed to shelf awaiting use.

It all reminds me of a comment from a friend - "God is process-oriented". Face it, here in the west especially we are very task- and outcome-oriented. We love to set our goals and the steps we need to get there. And if we can skip some steps to speed up the outcome, that's fine by us.

God doesn't think that way. Because He views things eternally rather than temporally, He doesn't get anxious like us at a process that delays an eventual goal. In fact, the process is central to His work in our lives. I would even go so far as to say the process IS the work.

The over-arching term for God's process in our lives is called sanctification. And the goal is certain: we are being made into His image. Along the way, that process of sanctification will take us through some lessons that we will learn quickly, and others that we will return to repeatedly until we grasp His viewpoint. In all cases, we have to trust the process. We have to trust that He is working toward that ultimate goal of Christlikeness. And we have to realize that the process can't be short-circuited. God can no more skip the painfully slow lessons than I could skip the 45 minutes our jars spent in the water bath canner before the spaghetti sauce was sealed.

It's such a relief to know that God has guaranteed the finished product of my life, and that He is in charge of the process. He's not just preparing me to sit on a shelf - He's putting within me what I need to serve, to be used and poured out for Him. All the things that seem to me to slow down the achieving of some goal are really part of the process.

I know I can trust Him, and I'm learning to sit back and enjoy the process!