Precious Gems

I was surfing the blog world today, looking for instructions on how to stitch a picot stitch and ran across a neat blog entitled "Avoiding the Laundry"! LOL Now THAT'S my kind of blog! Not only did she have detailed instructions on how to do some hardanger stitches, but she had a little blurb about my favorite gemstone...which also happens to be my birthstone...the Opal.

I can't explain exactly why I love opals so much, other than the fact that it was also the birthstone of my favorite Aunt...a wonderful lady who I admired very much. She was probably the kindest person I've ever met. She had a fabulous opal ring that I simply fell in love with and that began my love affair with opals. So I have loved them from a very early age.

When I read this story on her blog, I think it deepened my love of them even further, so I want to share it here on my blog as well. She had read a book by Isobel Kuhn, titled Stones of Fire comparing the author's life to a gem being worked on by a Master Lapidary. The stone is an Opal.

"Do you know that lovely fact about the opal? That in the first place, it is only made of desert dust, sand, and silica, and owes it's beauty and preciousness to a defect. It is a stone with a broken heart. It is full of minute fissures which admit air, and the air refracts the light. Hence it's lovely hues and that sweet lamp of fire that ever burns at it's heart, for the breath of the Lord God is in it.

"You are only conscious of the cracks and desert dust, but so He makes His precious opal. We must be broken in ourselves before we can give back the lovely hues of His light, and the lamp of the temple can burn in us and never go out." Ellice Hopkins

I've often said that everything happens for a reason...all the hardship we endure is for a purpose. It's like the gold refinement process, enduring incredible heat so the "dross" can be skimmed off and only the precious metal left behind. So are the cracks in the opal meant to reflect our Savior's light. My opals have a whole new meaning to me now!