Eight Lessons I’m Learning from Pain
For over a year now, despite this constantly being on my mind, I have been afraid to write this post. First, not many people have known what I’ve been struggling with, and opening this vulnerability to the world is frightening.
Second, though I am now more acquainted with physical pain than I have ever been, yet I feel grossly underqualified to write on this subject. Whenever a new thought or struggle comes to mind in light of this and I think of putting my fingers to the keys, a haunting voice whispers I don’t know anything about pain. It speaks of paralytics, and cancer patients, and terminal diagnoses, and those bedridden for life, and says, Be quiet. Shut up. No one will listen to you.
But late one night, I put my fingers to the keys to write just for me. This post was started months ago. I didn’t originally intend to publish it. But here’s the thing. The promises of the Lord that have sustained me through my bouts of physical pain are the same promises he gives to every hurting body and soul, no matter the length, or the severity, or the permanency of their illness.
I don’t know what you are experiencing. Our two circumstances are probably vastly different. But I do know a little of what it is like to hurt, to despair, to feel overwhelmed with pain, and to wonder how you’re going to continue living through it. And I know a Savior who knows exactly how you feel.
These are some of the promises he has given.
1. Prayer and Scripture are necessary to fight.
It seems in every battle of my life, I have first tried to fight it all on my own. This battle with pain was no different. For months, I would read short sections of Scripture, but when I tried to pray the words wouldn’t come. It felt like I had dried up inside. I was angry. And I didn’t even know what, or who, I was angry at. I prayed, when I was able, that God would make me want to pray.
And the pain kept getting worse.
And suddenly, one day, it was like the floodgates burst open. I was sitting in bed with my Bible open on my lap, and the pain was shooting through my body, and I just started crying and talking to God. It’s strange the things that come to your mind in moments like that.
As I was praying and sobbing and shaking, in the back of my mind the words from a book whispered softly: “Language went away and I prayed in a soft high-pitched lament any human listener would’ve termed a whine. We serve a patient God.”*
It certainly felt like a whine then: “God, my body feels like it’s breaking. God, I’m so sad – I don’t understand what you’re doing here. God, I feel like this is never going to end. God…I am scared. God this is so heavy.”
And over and over again: “God, help me! God, please help me!”
I poured out everything I felt: all the pain, the fatigue, every aching bone, and throbbing muscle, tingling nerve, and firing neuron, the heaviness, the weight, the darkness I felt smothering me, the crushing burden of both pain and sadness in my chest. I laid it all before his throne – a broken, tearful, impoverished offering – a trash heap I had been hoarding for far too long.
“Take it, Lord,” I pleaded. My stomach twisted. I felt like I couldn’t pray any harder. But I needed more words.
I scrambled through the pages of my Bible and started reading out loud, my voice weak and broken, barely above a whisper. Each line I would stop and pray it back to God: “Lord, you promise this. Lord, please do this. Lord, please help me to know this.”
When I finished, I prayed some more, stumbling along. I felt like a child who had barely learned to walk, trying to chase after her Father afraid that she would be left behind. “Don’t leave me here alone. I can’t do this alone. Please. Please.”
It was through these tears, this stomach-wrenching reality that I realized again – as in every fight before – that I must pray, for I have nowhere else to go.
If you feel like you are fighting a battle every moment of every day, it is because you are. Your body may be fighting to move, to act, to breathe. But your soul is fighting to live eternally. On the days that lie most heavy, when your body lacks strength perhaps even to speak your thoughts out loud, prayers can be whispered and thought to the Lord. Some of the soul’s greatest battles are fought from the isolated cage of a bed frame.
2. Pray for healing, but pray for more than healing.
It is biblical, Christian, and redemptive to pray for the healing of the body. This is reflected in Scripture again and again. Many of Jesus’ own miracles were to vanquish bodily pain. But they didn’t stop there. Reflecting on Jesus’ healing of the crippled man in John 5, Piper states this simple and profound truth: “Jesus had no intention of walking away from this man and leaving him with nothing more than a healed body.”
He goes on to say, “In the first coming of the Son of God into the world, we receive foretastes of his healing power. The full healing of all his people and all their diseases and disabilities awaits the second coming of Christ. And the aim of these foretastes, which we receive now, is to call us to faith and holiness.”
Many of us will not receive healing in this life, and whether we receive healing or not, our bodies will suffer, be broken, be changed, and be tormented before the end. In the present suffering of our bodies, pray for healing, yes, but pray for more than that: Pray that this suffering leads to holiness. Pray that God uses the battle of your body to win a greater battle in your soul. Pray that he would not just heal your flesh, but heal your heart.
Pray that your spirit would groan for sin as your lips groan in pain. Pray that your heart would break for righteousness even as your bones feel like they’re breaking. Pray that you would gasp and pant for Christ even as your lungs gasp and pant for air. Pray that your spirit would be refreshed and revived with eternal joy and strength greater than any that may fill our present bodies.
3. Accept the blow to your pride with humility and joy.
This is an especially hard one for me. I want to be seen as capable, articulate, successful, productive. I want to work hard and let others see the things I accomplish. I want to help others, save others, not be the one that needs saving.
This, however, can be hard when even the simple tasks and responsibilities of the day are a struggle. It can be a battle to get up in the morning, to limp to the kitchen, to stand and cook, and do laundry, and clean. It can be exhausting to focus my thoughts enough to get through college work or writing.
It can feel pride-shattering to use a cane in public, a disabled parking space, relearn how to speak after a seizure. It can be hard to smile, and talk, and eat, and laugh, and read, and pray.
But I realized the other day, I was pushing myself to finish the dishes, take out the trash, fold the laundry, angrily knowing that the more I pushed myself the more I was hurting myself, and feeling that the more I hurt myself the more I was determined to push through. Suddenly, the thought, almost with humor, flashed through my mind: “What am I trying to prove?”
So you can wash the dishes. Big deal. Literally, everyone does that. Resting. That’s the really hard part.
Focusing on school, on work, on each task of the day that God has given is important. But accepting my own bodily limitations and this life that I didn’t expect, is supremely more important.
What are the duties to which God has called you? Think bigger than laundry and work and school. Think soul-level, eternity-shattering big. You are called to so much more than the things in which your broken body hinders you. You are called to a lifelong fight. Sometimes, God chooses to give us victory by bringing us to defeat again and again. Accept the blow to your pride with humility. Rest in him with joy. Accept the help of others as help from the Lord.
If your pride in your own strength is the only thing shattered through this illness, it is an illness worth having all life long.
4. Let your own pain shape the way you see the pain in others.
It can be easy to brush off the pain of others when the pain you experience is so intense and continual. It’s easier to brush off the head cold or the thrown back with: “Yeah, try living with this every day.”
Don’t.
You are acquainted with pain in a unique way, and it allows you insight into the pain of others that few people have. Don’t waste that gift by building an altar to your own suffering with the twisted expectation that the world will bow down to it. Pray that your pain allows you to view with greater compassion the pain and suffering of others. Pray that your own pain opens opportunities to encourage others in a way few people are able.
The bruised knee, the scraped elbow, the stomach flu, cancer, depression, loss of limb or life or possessions – every grief and pain and sorrow is different for every person – but the answer to every grief and pain and sorrow is the same. It is Christ.
And if Christ, who experienced the greatest possible suffering known to mankind, having risen in glory, is our sympathetic high priest who remains with us in these passing, momentary sorrows and sufferings of this life, how dare we who face these temporal trials, turn hearts hardened with pride against the true sufferings of others? Christ never turns aside because his suffering is greatest, but instead enters into our sorrow, pointing us to our greatest hope. We have no excuse but to follow.
Tear down the altar to your own self-pity, grasp tightly a suffering hand, and limp together to the foot of the Cross.
5. Don’t waste your pain.
It is easy to become jaded and entombed in discouragement, in the permanency of the pain you are experiencing, in the stretching forth of future years of your life that might bring no change, or bring change for the worse.
Apathy is one of the greatest fiends of the Christian, cloaked in subtlety, in quietude, in one plodding moment followed by the next. Don’t allow pain to provide the key for him to enter. Don’t let suffering be the excuse to let him reign. He is a master that promises by reverse – instead of promising to give much, he promises to only take a little, and then takes it all in the end.
In the fight against apathy, against discouragement, there is a very real, practical demand for physical tasks and labor. For getting up and accomplishing what you can with your moments and energy. For blessing others in the ways you are able. For taking care of yourself, your possessions, your relationships.
But there are days, perhaps years, perhaps a lifetime, from which illness has robbed this physical ability. In that case, it is far easier to be discouraged. It is easy to fall into the trap of thinking that the value and meaning of our lives are built only in what we accomplish and produce. But that is a lie.
This fight, this race, this devotion to not wasting does not come from physical exertion, or accomplishments, or money, or the number of lives that we have changed. It is a race against unbelief. It is a fight against sin.
John Piper spoke to this topic in one of his Ask Pastor John posts:
He said: “The fight is a fight of faith. It’s not a fight to get out of bed; it’s a fight to rest in God. It’s not a fight to keep all the powers of youth, but to trust in the power of God. The race is run against doubt in God’s goodness and love for us. It’s a fight to stay satisfied in God despite the broken hips and lost sight and failed memory and inexplicable fatigue.
The race can and may be run flat out on your back.”
Listen, dear Christian: You are in pain because God is working something in you only your pain can accomplish. Don’t waste it.
Don’t waste your pain. Don’t allow it to go by as you harden your heart to the lessons God is teaching you through it.
The race is won by collapsing into his mercy. Even the most broken sinner may do that. Only the most broken sinner can.
6. Relish in the fact that you have the last laugh.
It may feel like in this daily battle for strength, yours is slipping away. Moments are lost, strength dwindles, bones ache, and our bodies fail.
Relish in the fact that they will not fail forever.
Christ has redeemed not only our souls but our bodies. He has been broken that this breaking might end. His bones ached that ours might be healed. Just as Christ has healed far more than the body, he promises to heal no less than the body.
A liturgy I have often read through this ordeal comes from Every Moment Holy, entitled: A Liturgy for the Feeling of Infirmities.
One of the paragraphs states:
Give us also a sense of humor
to wink at our weaknesses now,
knowing that they are but the evidences
of a perishable body
that will at your beckoning
rise again imperishable, and that the
greater joke is the one played upon death.
Relish in the fact that because of Christ, you have the last laugh.
7. Remember that strength is promised for today.
One thing my parents often remind me of is that God promises strength for tomorrow, but he gives us strength for today. If you look at the years stretching ahead in your life you may think, How, Lord? How will I get through this?
The answer is found in looking to him, not the length of your years. It is found in taking this next breath in faith. You cannot live through tomorrow’s pain yet, nor has he yet given you the strength for it. But when tomorrow comes, his strength will be there, just as it is there for you today.
8. Seek the Lord for more than answers.
It is easy to want answers, to ask God, Why?
Why does my life look like this? Why is my body failing? Why can’t I find out what’s wrong with me?
It is not wrong to ask the Lord for answers, but he does not promise answers. He promises so much more. He promises himself.
When your strength fails, when you’re lying flat on your back struggling to breathe, when your body loses control of the things you once thought in your power, seek the Lord, and seek him for more than answers, more than healing, more than control. Seek him for himself.
You will never find him lacking.
Soli Deo Gloria,
*Peace Like a River by Lief Enger.