BYU Professor Reframes the Refiner's Fire: Purification Comes From Presence, Not Just Pain

When Rebekka Matheson first responded to a psychiatric emergency as a volunteer on the Mobile Crisis Team in Rochester, New York, she didn't know what to do. She turned to her team leader, Josh, for guidance. His answer was a single word.

Presence…Just presence.— Josh, Mobile Crisis Team leader (as recounted by Matheson)

That moment became the spine of Matheson's address at BYU's Tuesday devotional in Provo, where the associate professor in the School of Medicine offered students a reinterpretation of one of Latter-day Saint culture's most familiar metaphors: the refiner's fire.

The conventional reading — drawn from the book of Malachi — holds that personal trials burn away impurities and strengthen the individual who endures them. Matheson pushed back, offering three reasons to be cautious about that framing: it can lead people to mistake suffering for divine punishment, to measure their own righteousness by how much they've suffered, and to treat spiritual growth as something that happens to them passively rather than something they actively choose.

Her alternative: the real refining happens when you choose to enter someone else's fire.

I have come to believe that it is our choice to be present, with our senses and our attention, with other people in their afflictions, that purifies our love into charity.— Rebekka Matheson, Associate Professor, BYU School of Medicine

To illustrate what that presence looked like before anyone had words for it, Matheson turned to the Old Testament. When Job lost nearly everything he loved, his friends didn't immediately speak. They sat with him in silence for seven days. That quiet, Matheson said, offered genuine comfort — comfort that evaporated the moment his friends began explaining why he was suffering.

The lesson she drew wasn't subtle: sometimes the explanation is the problem. Listening and simply being with someone can provide more comfort than any answer.

Sometimes presence means stepping into the hardest fires of another person's life.— Rebekka Matheson, Associate Professor, BYU School of Medicine

Matheson grounded the idea in the body itself. In an increasingly digital age, she urged students to engage their senses — arguing that humans have sensory capacities specifically suited to forming relationships, understanding others' experiences, and building empathy. She pointed to Jesus Christ's choice to take on an earthly body as the ultimate expression of this principle: presence made physical, through acts of service and love.

Through His Atonement, she said, Christ chose to enter humanity's suffering willingly — the defining act of charity, and the model she invited students to follow.

She also addressed the students' own tendency toward isolation, encouraging them to resist disconnection — whether from their classes, their congregations, or their communities.

Don't become disconnected from time, place, and from your people. Be present.— Rebekka Matheson, Associate Professor, BYU School of Medicine

Matheson closed with Psalm 139, which she said teaches that God is present even in the darkest moments — not always removing trials or providing answers, but there. Her final testimony was brief.

That is the sum of my testimony: God is love. Love is God.— Rebekka Matheson, Associate Professor, BYU School of Medicine

A full recording and transcript of the address are available on the BYU Speeches website and YouTube channel.

Why it matters — Matheson's reframing gives students — and anyone navigating a culture that valorizes personal suffering — a concrete, active alternative: that showing up for others, not just enduring your own trials, is where character is built.

Reported by byu.edu, pastors.ai