Winemakers will tell you the best wines come from grapes and vines that struggle and suffer. Bad soil oddly yields higher quality grapes. To produce the most complex and vintage wines, the grapes don’t need lush, beautiful soil. Instead, they need slate and sand. They need soils like clay and steep, rocky cliffs to produce wines of character.
There’s a deep truth hidden there that applies to more than just wine. When all is well in life and nothing challenges us, we tend to coast. In those happy go lucky, carefree times we are oblivious to our need for God and can, actually, become complacent about Him. Most of us like to be comfortable and seek those times of serenity and calm, but those aren’t the times that grow us. On the contrary, we can become spiritually out of shape and lazy.
To produce the richness and deep assurance of faith in our relationship with Christ, there must be struggle and sacrifice, pain and suffering. One could settle for a cheap bottle of wine, and while it looks the same on the outside, the contents are very different from a vintage blend where the grapes have been grown under the perfect conditions to produce a rare bottle of the best wine.
The next time you’re going through a rough ordeal and you just want to get out of the valley where you’re struggling, remember that the Vinedresser is using your present conditions to prepare something in you that is far more costly than a bottle of cheap wine.
The Best Wines