Who I Am With You (Imagination #10) - Staci Stallings Page 0,51

get broken,” Taylor continued, “it might break through the mask to the lead, but it might also break all the way through to the gold.” A new understanding bubbled up. “The fire burns the ropes.” Taylor nodded, seeing into a world she had no way of explaining. “The fire burns the mask and melts the lead. Lead melts…” She blinked into the white hot flash of understanding. “Lead liquefies at like 600 degrees, but gold doesn’t. That’s why you can burn the impurities out of gold and silver because it takes something much hotter to… seven times! They cranked the furnace up seven times hotter, but they didn’t burn! What… this is… this is crazy. Do you…?”

Looking at Merel, she knew there was no way to explain all of this. “Okay, if this is right, then it all makes sense.”

“I’m listening.”

With a bounce, Taylor shifted in her chair. “Okay. There’s that metaphor, the gold-lead thing.” She put her hands on one side of the chair. “We’re gold, but we think we’re lead. To get the lead off of the gold, you can chip at it, or you can burn it off. Lead melts at a lower temperature than gold, so putting it in a fire would separate it from the gold.”

“Okay.”

Taylor put her hands on the other side of the chair. “That process thing you talked about, that’s the burning away of the lead from the gold. That would take a fire, right? It would be like shattering what you thought was protecting you, breaking the mask so to speak, letting it melt away in a hot fire. I mean, not fun, right? But that’s the only way to ever realize there’s really only gold underneath. Satan thinks he’s going to prove there’s only lead by sending you through the fire, but what he really does is prove there’s only gold!”

Merel laughed. “Wow. Okay. You just took that to a whole new level.”

However, Taylor shook her head without coming all the way back from the visions of understanding. “But how do you do that? Even if you could, everybody else is going to think you are still lead, or that the stupid mask is who you always were, who you really are.”

“Don’t you think that’s part of the process too?” Merel asked. “It’s like you’re trying to be two different people—who you really are and who they think you are. It’s going to take some time for you to become you and for them to catch up when you stop trying to be who they thought you were.”

Taylor nodded and folded her hands. “It’s a process. It’s not a destination. I’m in the process. Yes, it’s a fire. Yes, it’s not fun. But I have to let go of the mask and the lead. Yow. Okay, that sounds like a real challenge.”

“Well, I have to say I think you’re already different than who you were when you came in here earlier.”

Laughing a little at that, Taylor shrugged. “I didn’t want to come.”

“I could tell.”

Peering into that, Taylor narrowed her eyes. “Man, Satan is good. He had me buying that whole load of garbage about I was trash and you were going to judge me and Greg was wasting his time…”

“The lies sound pretty convincing when we believe them.”

“They sure do.” So many things suddenly looked so very different, and suddenly, she was staring once again into the frightening unknown called the future. “I might have to go through the trial.” She nodded into that understanding, hating it, but now knowing it was true. “Wow. Okay.” Hunching forward, she continued to nod. “Satan thinks it’s going to break me, that I won’t get through it in one piece, but God says I’m gold. And if it breaks me, all that will do is reveal the gold.” She breathed into that as her heart ramped up. “But what if… what if I’m not gold? What if the lead really is all there is? It’s hard to believe it’s not.”

“One way to know it is to look at how hard Satan is working to get you to quit,” Merel said. “Do you think he would spend this much time and effort to get you to quit if he really thought you weren’t a threat?”

“I don’t… I don’t know.”

“Have you ever thought about Satan’s reaction when he got to the empty tomb on Easter morning?”

That yanked Taylor’s head up. “Huh?”

“Seriously. Think about it. Satan had Jesus right where he wanted Him, in the tomb,