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Psalms 66:10 · World English Bible

Psalms 66:10 Meaning For You

For you, God, have tested us. You have refined us, as silver is refined.

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What does Psalms 66:10 mean?

Being refined like silver is a hard image, because refining means fire. To read one's own suffering this way is to sense that the painful passages of a life are not random cruelty but part of a shaping process.

From the Psychoanalysis reading below.

Psalms 66:10 through 1 lens

The same verse, read by one tradition.

PSYCHOANALYSIS

Psychoanalysis

Being refined like silver is a hard image, because refining means fire. To read one's own suffering this way is to sense that the painful passages of a life are not random cruelty but part of a shaping process. Something larger than the conscious will seems to be at work, putting a person through heat they would never have chosen.

The trials do to a personality what fire does to raw ore. They burn away what is soft and false and leave behind what can actually bear weight. This does not make the pain pleasant, and it should not be sought out. But looking back, many people find that the times that nearly broke them were also the times they were made into someone more solid and real than they had been before.

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Live Psalms 66:10 today

  1. Think of the hardest year you have lived through and write down one thing you can do now that you could not do before it. Not to make the pain worth it, just to see what it left behind.
  2. When a friend is in the middle of something awful, resist telling them it will make them stronger. Sit with them in it instead. That line is only ever theirs to say, and only later.
  3. In the middle of a stretch that is wearing you down, a job, an illness, a strained marriage, ask one question: what is this teaching me to carry? Then go back to the day.

What in you was made solid by something you would never have chosen?

The same truth in other traditions

Stoicism · Marcus Aurelius

Fire takes whatever is thrown on it and turns it into light and heat. A mind can learn the same trick with obstacles, making fuel out of what was meant to stop it.

Stoicism · Seneca

No one knows what they are made of until they are tested. Seneca said hardship is not punishment but the only way strength ever gets proven, the way gold is held to the flame.

Sufism · Rumi

The reed makes its music only because it was cut from the reed bed. The wound is where the sound comes through.

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