Old "Beehive" Coke Ovens--and the Furnace of Affliction

While Jonathan and I were back in Ohio a week and a half ago, we wanted to do something with Timmy Saturday morning. I had hoped to take the tour of the Underground Railroad (since Salem, OH, used to be full of Quakers who helped fugitive slaves escape, and many old homes on main streets used to hide them, and tunnels ran underground various places). But the museum and tour wasn't open on Saturday. So I read about the Leetonia Beehive Coke Ovens only minutes away, and we decided to check those out.

No, those coke ovens weren't for Coca-Cola! They were for heating coal and turning it into better quality.

About 100 or so years ago, railroad tracks ran through here, loading and unloading coal that was put into these "ovens."

There were dozens of these brick ovens covered with mounds of dirt.

It was amazing looking inside those and wondering what it was like a hundred years ago when they were operational.

When all that freshly mined and poor quality coal was shoveled into these ovens to bake the impurities out of it and turn it into good quality coal for people to burn in their homes and stoves.

God uses the imagery of a furnace burning impurities out of gold to explain what is happening when He allows or perhaps ordains afflictions in our lives. The heat of those afflictions is not to destroy us, but to purify us.

 These coke ovens only cooked that coal for a certain length of time at a certain temperature, and then that was all. That coal was good to go out in the train to be used.

"When He has tried me," Job wrote in the midst of his affliction with loss and grief and pain and boils, "I shall come forth as gold."

"In this you greatly rejoice," Peter wrote, "though now for a little while, if need be, you have been grieved by various trials, that the genuineness of your faith, being much more precious than gold that perishes, (or coal that is burned up) though it is tested by fire, may be found to praise, honor and glory at the appearing of Jesus Christ."