My mother grew up in the shadow of what was at one time the largest copper mine in the world. The mine was in Jerome, Arizona and Mom spent her youth in Cottonwood, a town that supported the mining community with agriculture, shops, etc. In between was Clarkdale, the town that, as I understand it, grew up around the smelting operation.
It requires a great deal of turquoise green copper ore in order to extract any significant amount of pure copper. The ore is crushed, treated with chemical and at some point “smelted,” heated and melted down at temperatures high enough to separate a much more concentrated copper “matte” from the “slag,” which is drawn off and disgarded.
You can still see a huge slag heap near Clarkdale.
As our text for this week, Malachi 3:1-4 speaks of the coming Messiah as a “refiner’s fire,” I picture those heaps of waste mineral from the smelter operation near my mother’s home. It makes me wonder if our Lord has to melt off a similarly large proportion of “slag” from our lives in order to produce anything really good or useful.
Yet I’m also reassured that the Lord sees us as valuable enough to refine, that even the most corrupt of us, like the Levites of Malachi’s time, are worth the time and effort to redeem and purify what is good in us.
And even if we feel like slag heaps sometimes, the grace of Christ is working to refine us. I just read that a present day company is recycling that heap of slag by Clarkdale to extract gold and other precious minerals. That’s what our Lord would like to do with us.