A layer at a time

When I was a youngster, my mother was still carrying on a Depression-era habit of making her own soap. For months she’d save grease from cooking until she had enough to mix with lye according to her family’s passed-on recipe. I remember little of the process except it was hard work and dangerous. After cooking in a huge enamel pan on the stove, the concoction was poured into newspaper-lined boxes in the garage to cure. Later, she’d shred it into the washing machine.
I was so glad when she gave it up and just bought detergent! I also remember the worries about kids being around lye, which had a distinct skull-and-crossbones sign on it for “poison.”

I was reminded of its power as I recently re-read a classic missionary biography by Isobel Kuhn titled Green Leaf in Drought. The book recounted the suffering experienced by the last China Inland Missionaries trapped deep inside China in 1951, when all others were evacuated due to political turmoil. Despite severe hardship under ruthless local rulers, who brought them to the edge of starvation, Wilda and Arthur Mathews trusted God for the impossible. It would be two years before they were able to leave, first Wilda and their small daughter, and a few months later, Arthur.

Throughout their years of unjust and unfair treatment, the couple sought solace and hope in prayer, scriptures and devotional books. One poignant quote, from English preacher Alexander MacLaren (1826-1910), was this: “The meaning of all that God does with us—joys and sorrows, light and darkness…is that our wills may be made plastic and flexible.”

Wilda would look back on this excruciating time as her spiritual “lye bath,” remembering her job in a fruit canning factory when she was a girl. Peaches were plunged into a lye bath, then rinsed, to hasten the skinning step, then sent on conveyor belts to workers to put into tins for caning. For months after that job, the damage lye caused to her hands resulted in successive layers of skin coming off. “And so with this crucible experience,” the author wrote. “The layer of looking at other causes had to come off; then the layer of quickness to anger in the heart; the layer of longing for pretty things; the layer of over-sensitiveness; the layer of impatience (can’t we go now?), the layer of mere submission, and so on” (p. 45, 1981 OMF reprint).

I photographed an onion with lights to show its layers as another symbol of this “peeling away” the Spirit does to bring us closer to the Father’s heart. Whenever I peel onions for chopping, they bring on copious tears. And whenever God is doing some serious work in peeling away my sins of “looking at other causes,” there are going to be tears.

The process isn’t fun. But the end result, of growth in spiritual steadfastness and trust, is worth it.