Today I had a little heart to heart talk with my oldest daughter about what I believe is the single biggest thing we struggle with as human beings. C.S. Lewis wrote at length about it (which I have been meaning to read), the pages of the Bible are soaked with it and it is at the back of every human beings mind in some form or fashion. I am referring to the uncomfortable reality of pain.
I remember at very young age being exposed just enough to the Bible (I believe it was 1st Peter), that I had a built in reaction that caused me to shy away from having anything to do with it. I think much of the reason most people avoid God is because we don’t want to face pain, because we are all too acutely aware of its presence. As we get older we do our best to learn to acclimate to it the best we can. People use different techniques to deal with it or process it. Some people have to learn to do this allot more than others.
Perhaps at its worst is witnessing pain in those you love dearly.
First, to find where pain began for us we can look back at what the Bible says happened. Pain began with a broken relationship founded on a lack of trust. Then there was a separation and a death that resulted in that separation. Adam and Eve through their actions separated themselves from the source of life and love and in doing so invited death and pain into their lives.
We see these same things repeated over and over down through time ringing ever present in our own time and in our own individual lives. We live in a reality of death and pain and as a defensive mechanism, when we are hurt we either externalize it by hurting back or we internalize it allowing the hurt to define and hurt us in some big or small way.
So then an inescapable reality is that hurt begets hurt.
The problem wouldn’t be so terribly significant if it didn’t have such a long shelf life. When we get hurt, the reality is that it effects us all our lives. Cutting words, scarred or dysfunctioning bodies, the death of a loved one. As you grow older life begins to take its toll on even the most resilient and most well prepared. Some simply cannot handle it and resort to immersing themselves as deep as they can go into drugs, fantasies or even suicide or homicide.
What do you do when the pain feels like it is more than you can bare?
This is what was going through my head today as I began speaking with my daughter. How do I tell her to process pain?
For me, the most important thing to realize is that no matter how bad the pain is, it needs to be understood that it comes from other pain. If someone says a cutting or hateful thing or does something terrible to you or someone you love, the only way you can ever get passed this is to be able to find an attitude of compassion toward that person or persons for the hurt they caused and the only way to do that is to realize that the hurt they cause is the result of a cycle of hurt that exists in this fallen (hurt filled) world. Some people are so twisted and lost that they embrace the darkness of indifference and pain and others fall victim to it to varying degrees out of despair or hopelessness or frustration. I believe there is a part of each of us (the part that does not want to feel pain anymore) that is there somewhere in the back of our mind that saying, shelve love, all it does is cause you pain. Then there is another part that wants to believe in love, but can’t find the strength.
So is there any good news in all of this?
Thank God there is!
The Bible tells us that God foreknew from the foundation of the world what would happen and in time, became a man and took the sins (hurt) of the world upon Himself to restore the relationship lost in the beginning. That God was in Jesus reconciling the world to Himself not counting our sins against us and inviting us into this place of reconciliation and grace. Not only that, but He gives us the gift of His indwelling Spirit; that is, perfect love itself making its home in our hearts.
Through the truth of God’s love for us, we can face our pain, our failures, our hurts and the hurts of others with grace and compassion. We don’t have to accept the definition of what the world says about us or what our pain says about us or our performance says about us. We have the gift of God’s indwelling presence to testify to us what God says about us and not only us but those around us.
Yes there will continue to be hurt in this world until God makes all things new, but we no longer have to be defined by the perceptions and limitations of a broken and lost world. We have a perfect love from our Savior sent from God who has graciously called us out of darkness into His marvelous Light.
So when someone says something that hurts you, let God’s compassion be the lens which you see them through.
When struggles and failures come, let the reality of God’s unwavering and unconditional love and forgiveness already given to you, be the reality in which you see yourself.
When uncertainty brings questions and misgivings, let them give way to relentless trust in your Heavenly Father who will freely give you all things because it is His good pleasure to do so.
“With the arrival of Jesus, the Messiah, that fateful dilemma is resolved. Those who enter into Christ’s being-here-for-us no longer have to live under a continuous, low-lying black cloud. A new power is in operation. The Spirit of life in Christ, like a strong wind, has magnificently cleared the air, freeing you from a fated lifetime of brutal tyranny at the hands of sin and death.
God went for the jugular when he sent his own Son. He didn’t deal with the problem as something remote and unimportant. In his Son, Jesus, he personally took on the human condition, entered the disordered mess of struggling humanity in order to set it right once and for all. The law code, weakened as it always was by fractured human nature, could never have done that.
The law always ended up being used as a Band-Aid on sin instead of a deep healing of it. And now what the law code asked for but we couldn’t deliver is accomplished as we, instead of redoubling our own efforts, simply embrace what the Spirit is doing in us.
Those who think they can do it on their own end up obsessed with measuring their own moral muscle but never get around to exercising it in real life. Those who trust God’s action in them find that God’s Spirit is in them—living and breathing God! Obsession with self in these matters is a dead end; attention to God leads us out into the open, into a spacious, free life. Focusing on the self is the opposite of focusing on God. Anyone completely absorbed in self ignores God, ends up thinking more about self than God. That person ignores who God is and what he is doing. And God isn’t pleased at being ignored.
But if God himself has taken up residence in your life, you can hardly be thinking more of yourself than of him. Anyone, of course, who has not welcomed this invisible but clearly present God, the Spirit of Christ, won’t know what we’re talking about. But for you who welcome him, in whom he dwells—even though you still experience all the limitations of sin—you yourself experience life on God’s terms. It stands to reason, doesn’t it, that if the alive-and-present God who raised Jesus from the dead moves into your life, he’ll do the same thing in you that he did in Jesus, bringing you alive to himself? When God lives and breathes in you (and he does, as surely as he did in Jesus), you are delivered from that dead life. With his Spirit living in you, your body will be as alive as Christ’s!
So don’t you see that we don’t owe this old do-it-yourself life one red cent. There’s nothing in it for us, nothing at all. The best thing to do is give it a decent burial and get on with your new life. God’s Spirit beckons. There are things to do and places to go!
This resurrection life you received from God is not a timid, grave-tending life. It’s adventurously expectant, greeting God with a childlike “What’s next, Papa?” God’s Spirit touches our spirits and confirms who we really are. We know who he is, and we know who we are: Father and children. And we know we are going to get what’s coming to us—an unbelievable inheritance! We go through exactly what Christ goes through. If we go through the hard times with him, then we’re certainly going to go through the good times with him!
That’s why I don’t think there’s any comparison between the present hard times and the coming good times. The created world itself can hardly wait for what’s coming next. Everything in creation is being more or less held back. God reins it in until both creation and all the creatures are ready and can be released at the same moment into the glorious times ahead. Meanwhile, the joyful anticipation deepens.
All around us we observe a pregnant creation. The difficult times of pain throughout the world are simply birth pangs. But it’s not only around us; it’s within us. The Spirit of God is arousing us within. We’re also feeling the birth pangs. These sterile and barren bodies of ours are yearning for full deliverance. That is why waiting does not diminish us, any more than waiting diminishes a pregnant mother. We are enlarged in the waiting. We, of course, don’t see what is enlarging us. But the longer we wait, the larger we become, and the more joyful our expectancy.
Meanwhile, the moment we get tired in the waiting, God’s Spirit is right alongside helping us along. If we don’t know how or what to pray, it doesn’t matter. He does our praying in and for us, making prayer out of our wordless sighs, our aching groans. He knows us far better than we know ourselves, knows our pregnant condition, and keeps us present before God. That’s why we can be so sure that every detail in our lives of love for God is worked into something good.
God knew what he was doing from the very beginning. He decided from the outset to shape the lives of those who love him along the same lines as the life of his Son. The Son stands first in the line of humanity he restored. We see the original and intended shape of our lives there in him. After God made that decision of what his children should be like, he followed it up by calling people by name. After he called them by name, he set them on a solid basis with himself. And then, after getting them established, he stayed with them to the end, gloriously completing what he had begun.
So, what do you think? With God on our side like this, how can we lose? If God didn’t hesitate to put everything on the line for us, embracing our condition and exposing himself to the worst by sending his own Son, is there anything else he wouldn’t gladly and freely do for us? And who would dare tangle with God by messing with one of God’s chosen? Who would dare even to point a finger? The One who died for us—who was raised to life for us!—is in the presence of God at this very moment sticking up for us. Do you think anyone is going to be able to drive a wedge between us and Christ’s love for us? There is no way! Not trouble, not hard times, not hatred, not hunger, not homelessness, not bullying threats, not backstabbing, not even the worst sins listed in Scripture:
They kill us in cold blood because they hate you.
We’re sitting ducks; they pick us off one by one.
None of this fazes us because Jesus loves us. I’m absolutely convinced that nothing—nothing living or dead, angelic or demonic, today or tomorrow, high or low, thinkable or unthinkable—absolutely nothing can get between us and God’s love because of the way that Jesus our Master has embraced us.”
- Romans 8:1-39 (The Message)
