The Struggle Of Pain
“Numbing the pain for a while will make it worse when you finally feel it.”
~ J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
When I was a kid, summers were the best time of life. We would go out early in the morning, veer back home for lunch, and only reappear after the street lights came on, the universal sign that your outdoor freedom was done for the day. I grew up not far from the beach, but a lot closer were some streams, creeks, and the Blackwater River. My family had a rule concerning all this water. No swimming without an adult present. But one day, my friends told me about a new rope swing on the river that was within bike riding distance. So, we hopped on our sweet bikes with the banana seats and took off for the river. The rope swing was glorious, a real thing of beauty. Someone had nailed pieces of wood to the side of this tree that stood on the river bank, with branches that leaned way over the river’s edge. So, we would climb the 20 or so feet up the tree and someone would swing the rope to us and we would swing out over the river and crash into the deep cold water. We did this over and over again that afternoon, but as we were getting ready to go, I decided to swing one more time. This time, however, maybe because I was tired, I let go of the rope early and landed in the shallow water, right on my tailbone. It hurt like the dickens, and I don’t even know what a dickens is really. The ride to the house on my bicycle was painful, but I made it home. At this point, the question became, do I tell my Mom or not? If I tell her, it would certainly mean being on restriction, the major source of punishment in our home. So, I decided to stay quiet and conceal my pain.
Why do we conceal our pain?
The truth is, most of us tend to try to conceal our pain. Why? It’s the work of our old friend, fear. I knew if I told my Mom about the pain, she would do everything possible to help me find relief. I also knew that there would be consequences for breaking family rules, and at this point, the fear of the consequences was bigger than the pain I was already experiencing. And so, I chose to numb the pain. I loaded up on aspirin and fought my way through it. Little did I know that I was installing an operating system that would not be kind to me later in my life. Numbing our pain is dangerous. Hiding our pain is dangerous. Pain and discomfort are not always bad things. They can motivate you to action. C.S. Lewis in his book, The Problem with Pain, writes this, “Pain insists on being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasure, speaks to us in our consequences, but shouts in our pain. It is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”
Oddly enough, we live in a world that surrounds us with pain. We also live in a culture that has learned to avoid pain at all costs. We look for a way to sedate or numb the pain.
At this point, it is probably good to acknowledge that not all pain is physical. Sometimes the pain we deal with is emotional pain. It can be found in memories from our childhood. Someone spoke things to you that hurt you and caused you to see yourself differently than the way God sees you. So, you carry the pain that maybe that person was right, and you begin to wonder if maybe you are a loser. You think maybe I am worthless. Maybe I am not capable of being loved by another person. Maybe God is working in the lives of all my friends, and He doesn’t actually care about me
Pain speaks with a loud dull roar.
As a pastor, you deal with things like being misunderstood. People will distrust you because they have been hurt in church before, and you will feel it. You will experience the pain of people leaving your church, people you have loved, served, and ministered to, and they will leave without an explanation. It’s painful. So, we take that pain, and we let it speak to us. And the pain is there, constantly putting us in our place, reminding us of what it tells us we are. This causes a huge struggle inside of us as we start to realize that we cannot continue to carry that burden of pain. We cannot continue to listen to its painful accusations. So, we come up with a plan. We will numb the pain. We will silence the pain with drugs, alcohol, food, or with hours of escapism in movies or television. We will search for the love that we have grown to believe we cannot experience by going from one relationship to the next, always disappointed, and many times sabotaging the relationship by our inability to deal with our inner pain and voices. But what would happen if we looked at the pain as a problem to be addressed and not ignored?
What if there is more to dealing with pain than ignoring the hurt?
Recently a young man came to the church I pastor. He asked if he could speak to me after the service. So, I sat down with him and he began to tell me his story. He was a former paramedic and had earned two college degrees. He was an accomplished guitar player and had led worship in churches but alcohol had gotten the best of him. The morning he showed up at church, he had woken up shivering beside a dumpster behind a restaurant. He prayed that God would show him where to go for help. After talking to him for a while and listening to his story, I decided to take him to a local shelter that had a great recovery program. As we drove to the shelter, I bought him a cup of coffee, and we continued to talk. He told me alcohol was his problem, and that it had ruined his life. But I silently wondered if that was the actual problem. Maybe it was just something he used to mask the real problem. So, I asked him, and he begin to tell me some of the things he had dealt with in his life. So, rather than actually facing the pain and dealing with it head-on, he had opted to numb the pain, believing that he could somehow live normally in that manner. But it was not to be. The alcohol became a trap, and the pain always came back. It was finally time to deal with the source of his pain.
How do you deal with pain?
Do you ignore it and hope it will simply go away? Do you attempt to numb the pain, and in turn cause even more destruction in your life? Or do you deal with the pain? Maybe there is another question to ask first. Is there a redemptive plan in pain? During my season of burnout, I learned something very powerful about the pain I was going through at the time. Many days I would read through the book of Psalms, taking great comfort in exploring how the Psalmist would wrestle with his pain. I would read how he would bring the pain to God, talking about the hurt, the uncertainty, and the fear. I would identify as he cried out trying to understand what was happening. And as I read and pondered that, I realized that it was in bringing the pain to God, that he found relief. When the Israelites were slaves in Egypt, Exodus chapter two said that they cried out to God in their pain and that God heard their groanings. As I read through the Psalms, David was brutally honest with all the things he was feeling. He didn’t hold back. He spoke it out. And as he gave a voice to his pain, he began to see that he was not alone. He was not unloved. Instead, God was there in the midst of his pain, ready to help.
In the midst of his time of great suffering, Job found God in a new way and said in Job 42:5, “My ears have heard you, but now my eyes have seen you.” It was the same for David, as he spoke of his pain to God, he began to see God in a profound new way. Even in the moments where he was expressing his deepest hurts and doubts, in the end, the narrative would change and he would find his hope in God.
Giving a voice to our pain.
In Psalm 42:5, David begins to talk to his inner man and he says, “Why my soul are you so downcast? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise Him, my Savior and my God.” Giving a voice to our pain gives us a chance to meet with God in a way that brings incredible hope. In the book of Hebrews, we come to an understanding that we have a God who is not distant to us in our suffering, who is not indifferent to our pain, but instead understands us more than we could ever imagine. Hebrews 4:14-16 says, “Therefore, since we have a great high priest who as ascended into heaven, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold firmly to the faith we profess. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have One who has been tempted in every way, just as we are – yet He did not sin. Let us approach God’s throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.”
I think so often we think in the way that the disciples thought in Mark, chapter 4. They found themselves in the midst of a raging storm and after fear gripped them, they go looking for Jesus. When they find Him, He is asleep on a cushion in the stern of the boat. The incredulous disciples then woke Him up, asking Him, “Teacher, don’t you care if we drown?” Mark 4:38b Well, the answer is that He does care. As the great High Priest, He experienced life on this planet. He felt emotional pain and physical pain. He knew the sting of betrayal. He felt the pain of friends who deserted Him in His time of need. He understood how it felt to have someone lie about you and say things that were not true. He experienced the tough aspects and pains of humanity. Because of that, He shows us that He is one that understands the pain of this world. He understands it, not as some far away distant God, but as God who became flesh and walked on this difficult planet. And as we walk through the chaos of this life, we can find the courage and confidence to persevere in Him. We become brave.
In our pain, we find Him, present, listening, caring, and ready to give us strength.And in Him, we discover answers in our pain. In Him, we find hope in our pain. This side of heaven, pain, emotional and physical, will always be a part of our life. The answers are not found in numbing our pain or ignoring our pain, but instead, by giving voice to our pain, and engaging God in our pain, we find the strength to go on and discover a new intimacy in Him that helps us through our life. As you take the time to examine your pain and give voice to your pain, maybe you need someone that you can talk with to deal with the struggles of your pain. At Pastor to Pastor, our team is here to help you, and give you strength and courage to not only learn how to live with your pain but to help you overcome the pain. If you are right now realizing that you have in some ways been trying to numb your pain rather than deal with it, go to the connect tab on this website. We have tons of resources, and a great team to help you push through this season of pain. Help is just a tab click away.
