" Blood is the price we pay for access to God, and it comes at great expense.

God has invited us to His winepress so that He can do with us that which is necessary to reconnect something temporal to its eternal source. Don’t be surprised and begin to despair at the onset of the crushing you will endure. Don’t run from it; run to it, because you’re not being crushed simply for crushing’s sake. Your pain is not going to last and, like the labor pains of an expectant mother, will produce new life.

The crushing is meant to do two things: get out of you what’s in you, and get the true you out of the thin skin that encases you. The crushing of the grape not only expresses the juice from the flesh, but it also separates the unusable parts of the grape from the juice.

Your crushing is nothing more than the beginning of a glorious transformation process that will reveal to the world and you who and what you really are. Just like the grapes being trampled comes first, so does your crushing. There is more to come—so much more. "

― T.D. Jakes , Crushing: It's Not the End!