The Asarco mine in southern Arizona is a vast area of 20,000 acres with a complex, coordinated system of vehicles and machines all designed to excavate desired metals from the earth.  The largest vehicles on site are the haul trucks, each costing four million dollars.

They have six gigantic wheels with tires that must replaced every six months costing $40,000 each.

Haul trucks collect the rubble and transport it to the processing plant where rock is crushed, ground, and refined.  The Asarco mine yields 132,000 pounds of copper annually, transformed mostly into plumbing and electrical infrastructure for homes. All this digging and processing provides a better life for all and most of us don’t even realize the importance of such mining.

Sort of like our souls . . .

We all need to know and be known.

And so we mine and we are mined.

We allow others to get under our skin, to break through our facades, to dig deep.  Going beyond the surface requires time, effort, and courage.  And such mining can be difficult, dangerous work.  We can fall into pits and risk getting buried alive.  Is the risk worth the gain?

And with God . . .

How much time and effort do we spend going deep, developing relationship with our Creator, not being satisfied with superficial religiosity?  God wants relationship, not religion!  He wants our raw hearts more than our petty sacrifices and pretty shows. Our God is not superficial about anything or anyone.  Are we?

Superficiality is killing our souls, I believe.  We are becoming surface feeders with God and with one another, content with crumbs thrown out because we refuse to break open.

We want fast.  We want instant.  We want easy.

But fast, instant, and easy is not the way to intimacy with God or others. We need time.  And we need to take time.  We need to mine depths of being if we want riches.  We need to work through the process of extracting the valuable. Because that’s what God does with us, the crown of His creation.

God loves us too much to settle for superficial.  And surface improvement is not what relationship with Him is about.  It’s about plunging into depths and pulling out rubble.  It’s about refining and transforming.  It’s about finding the raw and making it beautiful, valuable, useful, no matter how long it takes.

And it all begins with breaking.

Surfaces must be broken.

Will we allow the great and tender hand of God to dig and break and crush and sift and refine? It’s not the way of the coward or sluggard.  It’s the way of the one who wants to be all he or she was created to be.  It’s about the most satisfying relationship possible—to be truly known—to be thoroughly loved.

God is unearthing me here in this life.  He is digging through my crusty hard.  And it hurts.

But God will not leave me in a pile of rubble.  He’s searching through every bit of me and He will never stop till He finds what He wants, till He pulls me up and out and apart, till He removes all dross, transforming me into who I was before I left Him.  Because, to Him, I am . . .

Valuable.

Treasured.

Loved.

Want to be mined?