Refined

There's always so much to think about...hmmm...
Words that have been flying around my brain today are things like 'change', 'becoming', 'refining'. I've been reflecting on a talk in church this last Sunday from one of my new favorite Latter-day Saints!
She told a story of how she and her family were in a gold mine and they were told by the tour guide that there was gold all around them but they couldn't see it. Pure gold doesn't start out purely gold! You can't even tell it is gold at all.
It makes me think of us and how we start out. I was only a small girl in Virginia. I loved painting and crayons and organizing colored pencils for elementary school, but I was so shy. I wouldn't buy lunch because I was afraid that I wouldn't be able to do math right and some days I don't think I spoke a word at all before I walked through the front door, home from school.
How does someone change and break old habits that keep from progression? How do we as humans change and become, "even as He is"?
We start out rough and hardly refined, but that is why Jesus Christ established His gospel. Through faith, repentance (or change), baptism and taking the sacrament, recieving the Gift of the Holy Ghost and seeking to follow the Holy Ghost is what brings us to become a new creature.
I was reading in Revelations and I cam across this scripture:
"To him that overcometh will I grant to sit with me in my throne, even as I overcame, and am set down with my Father in his throne." (Revelation 3:21)
It reminded me of a scripture I love in the Book of Mormon. First in Alma 7:23-24 it lists attributes of Christ that we must seek to develop. The one that stands out to me most is humility. Then he says, "And may the Lord bless you and keep your garments spotless, that ye may at last be brought to sit down with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and the holy prophets who have been ever since the world began, having your garments spotless even as their garments are spotless, in the kingdom of heaven to go no more out."
I know that we each have an incomprehensible potential. We may not see it in ourself but the Lord sees it, just as we see a clump of dirt that has potential to be refined and shining gold.
We ought not to keep ourselves or others from attaining that potential. That is our purpose in life, to reach our greatest potential, which is to become, "perfect even as I, or your Father who is in heaven is perfect."
One last thought. In the Book of Mormon, there is a well known vision seen in a dream by the prophet Lehi, found in 1 Nephi 8. In the dream there is a path with a rod which leads to a tree which represents the Love of God. That path leads through a mist of darkness. We too will go through mists of darkness, in fact we are in it right now. At the grocery store, at school, at work. Do we see the glimmer in others as we pass the halls? Do we see it as we look in the mirror?
I know its there. I hope we will all endure well that we may become like Him.
http://lds.org/general-conference/2011/04/as-many-as-i-love-i-rebuke-and-chasten?lang=eng&query=christofferson