Forging of The Soul

I feel as if my soul is being forged right now, beat out on the anvil of life.  It is not an overly pleasant feeling.

That strikes me as odd because I would think that it is something that people - well, at least myself - would actually like. After all, this is what I write about a great deal, correct?:  becoming more of yourself, pushing yourself towards doing more of what your actual purpose in life is, having the less desirable parts fall away.  This is the goal, or at least what I am striving for, right?

Certainly, in theory.  The practice is a bit more difficult.

Is it the heating that I do not like?  That sense of being thrown into the furnace of life and having the temperature of your life rise as the flames heat you, to feel first the outer core and then your inner self become infused and then hot with the transmitted heat of circumstances and people that seem to push you to the break point as the events and circumstances expand your life while it seems to maintain its present form?

Or is it the hammering, that place that finds you between the hammer face and the anvil, as you are pounded repeatedly or twisted uncomfortably?  The pain of the heat may be removed but now it is replaced by blows or twisting that just seems to come and come without any sense is going on or hope that things are going to stop.

The ultimate problem, of course, is that the piece of metal can never truly know what the ultimate outcome of the forging is.  It is nothing without the master hand of the blacksmith, who has the design in mind as does not heat merely once or twice but repeatedly, ultimately converting the steel into something pleasing to the eye and useful to others.  It is the blacksmith that determines how long to heat and how many blows to lay and where to lay them.  It is the metal's job to heat and form.

We often fool ourselves, I think.  We feel ourselves to be the blacksmith, heating and hammering the metal, when really we are the metal and being formed by a Blacksmith greater than us.  We become surprised when the heat and hammer are applied in ways that we did not anticipate - because we forget that we are the thing being forged, not the forger.

I know who The Blacksmith is, and I have a wavering trust - not the level I should have - in what His ultimate outcome is.  I just wish that I could understand what He is forming me into.