One of the most amazing things about our Loving God is His astonishing ability to take our curses and turn them into blessings:
"However, the Lord your God would not listen to Balaam but turned the curse into a blessing for you, because the Lord your God loves you." Deuteronomy 23:5
One of the very good benefits that comes from being a Christian is this direct promise from God that when you suffer, God will in some remarkable way take that hurt and transform it into a blessing for you. An excellent example of how this works can be seen in the oyster: when a grain of sand gets into its mouth, it is an irritation, but the oyster then secretes a special saliva that coats the rough edges of that piece of grit, until layer upon layer is built up, producing a pearl.
In the same way, when irritations come into the lives of Christians, the Holy Spirit does his wonderful work, and through a process of submitting ourselves to God, the evil thing that was so hurtful to us ends up transformed into a pearl: a pearl of wisdom, skill, strength, grace and blessing. James 1:2-4
This ability to turn sand into pearls is only available to Christians, because only they have the life-giving Holy Spirit inside of them. If you put that same gritty dirt into a pig's mouth, it would just remain a piece of slobbery sand!
