Maybe something can only be born when something else dies. Maybe our 'coming alive' feels like being dragged through the dirt. Maybe you and I are hanging my a thread of grace for most of our lives and we're expected to be humble, not haughty, with the breaks we've been given. Maybe we're supposed to pay good deeds forward. Maybe we're supposed to think what's in it for me? far less than we do. Maybe we need to sacrifice more. Maybe it won't feel like a sacrifice at all, but more like the sensation of becoming unnumbed.

In any case, you can't have effective allegory in times when people are swept this way and that by momentary convictions, because everyone will read it differently. You can't indicate moral values when morality changes with what is being done, because there is no accepted basis of judgment. And you cannot show the operation of grace when grace is cut off from nature or when the very possibility of grace is denied, because no one will have the least idea of what you are about.

Endure every hardship as a discipline of grace.

Discipline is to present us before grace, it does not produce grace to make sense.

It is no accident that the words discipline and disciple resemble each other in the English language. The most common word in the Gospels for a Christian is disciple.

Christ never told his disciples that they would get an Academy Award for their performances, but He did tell them to expect to have troubles.