Pearls are the reward to the mollusk for going through pain. They begin to form when an irritant gets into the mollusks shell and to accommodate for the pain of the intrusion, the mollusk creates comfort to itself by covering the irritant in layers of shimmering nacre. 

When there is no irritant within a mollusk, there is no pearl. Just as there are no rainbows without rain and there is no new life without the agony of childbirth. Some of the most beautiful things come from pain. 

At one point many years ago, it looked like my life was over. My marriage fell apart, and I was left all alone. I became a single mom and everything in my life felt like a nightmare at the time. 

To add salt to the wound, I was put into a place of having no place to live and no one to help me. I had no income and no vehicle. I was living in someone else’s home and that door was closing. 

The pain of fear was irritating my soul like an irritant inside a mollusks shell. I was surrounded by dangers, as all the fears of bad things that could happen flashed before my eyes. 

I was devastated and hopeless with despair. It was one thing to be faced with being homeless on my own… I could handle that. But to have to face that fear while supporting kids was a terrifying moment. 

In the midst of my fears and anguish, the Lord spoke to me and told me to take the money that He would send me and to go to a motel room in a nearby town. That was crazy to even consider, because I was in a state that was completely unfamiliar to me and I didn’t know anyone. I was all alone…or so it seemed. 

With no other options and no other choice, I followed Jesus to that hotel room. God had made me a personal promise to be our endless financial support and that He would be our home. God asked me to trust and obey His plans for my life and that He didn’t want me to go out and get a job. He said that my blog was my income and His promise would be the never ending bucket of support. 

He assured me that we would never be without a comfortable place to call home and that we would never go without the money that we needed. 

During that time, I faced more fears than I can even describe. So many nights I would weep with my pillow over my face so that my kids couldn’t hear me. I would hide in the bathroom and lay across with floor in a puddle of tears. 

When I needed God to rescue me with last minute money to cover the room, I would walk up and down the road and pretend like I was on my cell phone. Then I would cry to God and sob my eyes out from the fear of being homeless. 

The fear that I went through was like the irritant inside a pearl, but every time I chose to trust God and believe that He would honor His promise to support us, then it was like I was covering that irritant with the beauty of nacre. 

No one had prepared me for the amount of pain that I would be going through. I had so many deep rooted fears and unbelief that needed to come out. This journey has been my deliverance from fear and doubt. 

Like a pearly nautilus, always expanding into more, we started out at cheap hotels and then God would increase our comforts. He took me through this “shedding of fear” process for several years. 

My need to be relieved of those deep fears was immense. Most of us carry fears that we don’t even notice but once God moves us out of our natural comfort, those fears start to come out. 

Having fears come out is a good thing. It is a sign that they are leaving your soul and body. Like forming a pearl, the irritation is a sign of the beauty that is going to appear. It is a blessing in disguise. 

Eventually God took us to live in beautiful homes. He supported everything, and it came through many miracle ways. Sometimes it was through donations, sometimes I would have mysterious money show up in my bank. 

The thing that I found was that God was always faithful to His promise, but He would often move in ways that I couldn’t predict. I needed to stay “uncomfortable” by trusting Him with an open heart. That is what helped me to trust in His ever-present love showing up to honor His words. 

I wrote a very detailed journal about this whole experience in a book called, “Naked Wings”. It is a book of total transparency and I do not hide anything. It shows what it was like to live on only faith and miracles. 

It is completely raw and exposes the pain and the beauty of it all. You can find that on my website, www.diamondsfromthedust.com 

When bad things threaten to harm us, they are not always as bad as they look or seem. God will use those bad things to be like an irritant that slips into the vulnerable places of a mollusk. 

He will cause them to become beautiful blessings to us. Even if your life looks completely hopeless or that there is no way for you to get through what has happened, just remember that you are brining up a pearl from it all. 

That pearl will be the exquisite treasure that will change your life and cause your dreams to become a reality. Everything is a blessing to you–even bad news. You are always going to come out of every situation as a winner and even more blessed than when you started. 

You will be adorned in even more beauty from your suffering and trials. God will rescue you from out of every fear coming true, like mollusk creating a pearl of great comfort from out of the pain. 

Believe it or not…your struggles and hurts are a blessing. God never once allowed anything that I feared to come. The fears were just the irritation. Instead of my fears being done, God gave me the outcome that I hoped for, as pearl of comfort from my distress. 

You will get beyond the anguish of it all, and you will see that those very terrifying moments are what caused you to receive a rich and costly pearl of great comfort from God. 

I pray that you would receive comfort from whatever difficult thing you may be going through and that not one of your fears would ever come true. May you be comforted with the outcome of your hopes coming to the surface. 

I love you, and thank you for sharing your time with me today 💛

Dannette

https://linktr.ee/dannetteward

https://diamondsfromthedust.sellfy.store/p/naked-wings-ebook/

On the podcast:

https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/dannetteward/episodes/Pearls-from-Pain-e23g68g