I'd Tell You, Kid, But You Wouldn't Believe Me

Even before he can talk, my little boy has started to hum back the lullabies we sing routinely.  One of his favorites is "Twinkle, twinkle little star. How i wonder what you are."  As comforting as it is to hear a child singing, to lay on your back in the grass and point out tiny diamonds in the sky, a part of me wants to explain.  Because of course we know what that little star is.  Far out in space, immense nuclear furnaces drive the workhorses of the visible universe.  A tiny fraction of the power from one star drives nearly every process on Earth, but ultimately even the stuff we are made of was created in stars, the last stages of giant stars that blasted heavy elements into the vicinity of the proto-Sun in some of the biggest explosions anywhere ever.  How cool is that?  Bizarrely, though we think of stars as nuclear powered, nuclear fusion actually holds the more energetic gravitational collapse in check; the most powerful force in existence barely restrains the weakest.  Even more amazingly, all but one of those stars is so far away that a glowing ball bigger than a million Earths is reduced to a dot.  Most are farther away than that.  You need advanced optics to even see collections of billions of stars spinning around each other.  The scale of the Universe is beyond even the numbers children make up to be ridiculous.  A billion trillion miles barely gets you out of our local cluster of galaxies.  It may be that there is nothing new under the Sun, but there's an awful lot that we haven't explored yet.

"Why are there so many songs about rainbows and what's on the other side?

Rainbows are visions, but only illusions.  Rainbows have nothing to hide.

So we've been told and some choose to believe it.  I know they're wrong wait and see.

Someday we'll find it, the rainbow connection, the lovers, the dreamers and me."

As much as we love Kermit the Frog in this house, he's really flubbed this one.  First, rainbows aren't technically illusions. They are exactly what they appear to be, its just that you're seeing different images from many microscopic objects to form the complete picture.  That's why rainbows are so amazing!  They have nothing to hide because they are themselves a revelation!  They are proof that every beam of sunlight is made up of all the colors you can imagine, but its only when refracted through a cloud of tiny water drops that those colors split out so you can see them.  But it gets better.  Sometimes a color is missing, or sometimes there is more of one color than there ought to be.  The things that add or remove colors here in our backyards are the same things that add or remove colors in the sky or on distant stars and planets.  By splitting the light coming from far-off places into rainbows, we can tell what they're made of, how far away they are and sometimes where they're going.  Closer to home, spectroscopy lets us look into the hearts of molecules and even date fossils.  The dreamers have found the rainbow connection.  They dreamed of knowledge pouring out from every ray of light and then clothed their dreams in metal and glass.  Now they're using it to reach for the stars.

Someday i will explain all this.  I hope my son develops the expertise to find wonder far beyond what his eyes can see.  I hope he learns to fill his mind beyond capacity with the awesomeness of the world around him.  But to every thing there is a season.  Tonight, we're using non-equilibrium dynamics to solve the "kicking a ball without falling over" problem and finding diamonds in the sky.  For tonight, i couldn't ask for more.

Refined Like Silver, Tested Like Gold

The Bible makes a number of references to God refining us.  Here are a few examples:

• And I will put this third into the fire, and refine them as one refines silver, and test them as gold is tested. They will call upon my name, and I will answer them. I will say, ‘They are my people’; and they will say, ‘The Lord is my God.’” (Zechariah 13:9)
• See, I have refined you, though not as silver; I have tested you in the furnace of affliction. (Isaiah 48:10)
• But he knows the way that I take; when he has tried me, I shall come out as gold. (Job 23:10)
• The crucible is for silver and the furnace is for gold, and the Lord tests hearts. (Proverbs 17:3)

The people for whom the Old Testament was written are assumed to know how gold and silver are refined.  Maybe in a world dominated by gold and silver coins that shouldn't be too surprising.  At any rate, most readers from the age of fiat currencies probably gloss over these passages.  Below is a brief primer ramble in metallurgy aimed at illuminating the above metaphors.

Refining refers to the process of drawing impurities out of a material without inducing a chemical change.  For metals with fairly high initial purity, this is usually done in the liquid phase.  When heavy metals like gold or silver are refined, some impurities burn away, while others float to the surface and must be scraped off.

Silver melts at 962 C (1763 F) which is hot, but not an extraordinary temperature for handling metals.  We don't normally think of metals as 'burning', but molten silver will rapidly oxidize if raised much above its melting point under normal atmosphere.  This process is irreversible and effectively destroys the melt.  For this reason, silversmiths watch their crucibles very carefully, adjusting the heat and skimming off slag over a long period.  To say that something is 'refined like silver' implies that, yes, the subject is pushed to an extreme until it loses its old form, but the Refiner is paying very close attention, making sure that the heat never becomes too much and periodically working with the subject to remove undesirable things which have come to the surface.  This can be a long process, which is completed when the silver takes on its characteristic mirror finish.  When the Refiner can see Himself reflected in the melt, the refining is complete.

Although gold is right below silver on the periodic table, it is handled very differently.  It melts at a slightly higher temperature (1064 C, 1947 F), but never oxidizes under normal atmosphere.  This means gold can be processed in a blast furnace or (nowadays) an arc furnace.  Unlike the carefully regulated flames under the silversmiths crucible, these technologies are designed to spend fuel (coal or electricity, respectively) as quickly and thoroughly as possible with minimal attempt at control.  The goldsmith doesn't fiddle around with surface skimming either.  Anything that isn't gold in a blast furnace burns or separates.  If something is to be 'refined like gold', it should expect intense heat with little or no regard for its safety (hence Jobs' comment).  The Refiner is trying to remove contaminants rapidly and really doesn't care what happens to them or whether the subject is highly attached to them.  He is only interested in the indestructible essence which gives the subject such immense value and warrants such an extravagant expenditure of wrath...er, fuel.

How are gold and silver tested?  Today, silver is tested by dissolving it in nitric acid.  In Biblical times, you tested silver by attempting to refine it.  This squares with the interchangeable use of 'testing' and 'refining' in different translations of the above passages.  As Proverbs 17:3 implies, gold can also be tested in a furnace, but there are several countertop methods which might be referred to in Zechariah 13:9.  First, gold was by far the densest material known to the ancient world.*  Even gold alloyed with lead would be considerably lighter than a pure gold object of the same size.  So if someone claimed to have a 1 uncia** gold coin, you could check its density against a reference gold uncia to determine its authenticity.  Second, pure gold is a good resonator.  It makes a clear, rich tone when struck.  Heavily alloyed or plated gold usually makes a dull thunk.  If something is 'tested like gold', it might be measured against an external standard to see if foreign inclusions have made it less substantial than expected.  It might also be perturbed sharply to see if it naturally responds like the thing it is claimed to be.

*Modern scam artists will plate gold around a tungsten core to fake the weight.  Tungsten was discovered as a pure element in 1781, so that wasn't a risk Biblical readers would consider.

**A Roman talent (weight) was 32.3 kg.  1 talent = 100 libra = 1200 uncia, so 1 uncia = 27 g.  A Roman talent (monetary) meant a talent of silver (or, rarely, gold), about $21,000 (or $1,300,000) at current prices.  So Jesus' parable of the servant who owed 10,000 talents in Matthew 18:24 was clearly intended to be a non-physical value, an incalculable debt.  But the wealthy man in Matthew 25:14 might have distributed eight talents of silver to trusted servants for investment.  His annoyance that $20,000 was buried instead of deposited is understandable.

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What might God be doing with all this silver and gold?  The obvious metaphor is their coinage property; they have worth because the King finds them inherently valuable.  But precious metals are used for all sorts of things besides coinage.  In labs, silver and gold are routinely used for their very high conductance and reflectivity.  For example, a common problem in cryogenics is the desire to keep two geometrically-isolated objects at the same temperature, which is equivalent to bringing them very close together on a thermal map.  To do this, you need to run a thin wire between them which carries a lot of power very easily.  If you can afford it, the best material for this application is ultra-high purity, annealed silver.  If God refers to you, who make contact with both Heaven and Earth, as 'refined like silver', it is possible that He wants you to bring together two things which can't be physically co-located by transferring power from one to the other.

To prepare silver for use as a thermal tie, you must first make it into the right shape.  This usually means extruding it into rods or sheets and bending those into the desired geometry.  Such cold working causes the normally malleable silver to stiffen, pulling sheets of atoms against each other.  Internal stress makes it less workable and less conductive, so the silver should be annealed in its final shape before use.  Annealing requires heating the piece back to nearly its melting point in a specially prepared atmosphere.  The goal is for the silver to let go of its internal strain fields (to fully accept its current shape on a microscopic level) and to chemically alter any trace impurities so they don't impede conduction.  Annealing is a shape-specific treatment, so bending the piece through use gradually reduces its effect.  Where flexible thermal ties are absolutely necessary, they ought to be removed and re-annealed occasionally.  This is generally avoided because it is extraordinarily tedious to extract the part, create an annealing atmosphere, slowly ramp up the power and monitor the anneal so that the part is restored but not damaged.

The maintenance program for the Body of Christ calls for each piece to be routinely pulled out of its working role, isolated from its usual atmosphere and, often, treated to power way beyond its usual load which nevertheless has no external effect.  It might seem strange or even offensive to an outsider that mature Christians claim to experience God's power most in their quiet times.  This isn't about purification, though that may occur as well.  Instead its about reorganizing internal structures, bringing out the stresses incurred with use and letting God reshape us according to our changing place in the whole structure that is the Church.  This isn't the sort of treatment you give to bullion coins, however valuable.  Its a regimen more suited for flexible parts that need to constantly respond to a changing environment.  It implies that God wants to teach us to fully accept the shape He has given us and that we should be prepared to carry His power on a regular basis.

If we can stretch an ancient metaphor to cover modern applications, this says something about how we should expect God's power to work in our lives.  The perfect thermal tie is one that is very well anchored at both ends and offers no impedance to power flowing through it.  They are valuable because they are compliant, but they don't do anything besides gradually spread out to contact as much of the two endpoints as possible.  To be effective, we need to maintain our purity and really accept the configuration we've been given.  Both of these tasks require an external power source.  We also need to let ourselves flow outward to make as much contact with Heaven and Earth as possible.  This means cultivating deep prayer and deep friendships, speaking in tongues and speaking in lecture halls.  Then we need not worry about "accessing" God's power.  When you bridge a state imbalance with a conductor, power just flows.  Until we achieve a state of 'On Earth as it is in Heaven', anybody who touches both carries power all the time.  If configured properly it shouldn't be obvious.  It ought to manifest as healthy relationships, effective ministry and other distributed effects in the same way that a good heat strap looks completely inert until you check your thermometers.  In this model, things that we think of as "displays of God's power" are the equivalent of local welding.  It means you encountered something so broken it needed to be melted.  This world is broken enough that we should be prepared for this, but we don't need to work to make it happen.  It is enough to become the kind of people through whom power flows.  The rest will take care of itself.