Embrace Your Pain and Be Blessed! (Part 3)
William Gaultiere, Ph.D.
Executive Director of New Hope Crisis Counseling, Crystal Cathedral
Clinical Psychologist & Spiritual Director, ChristianSoulCare.com
3. We experience pain from tragedies and losses that happen.
We live in a fallen, imperfect world where stressful events occur. Recently, I experienced a painful accident. The trunk of a liquid amber tree that I had cut down over a year ago was laying in my side yard. I finally got sick of looking at it and decided to chop it up into logs for our fireplace. At one point I had cut half way through a section of the wood and thought I could save some time by stomping down hard on the log and breaking it. When I did half of it flew up and hit me in the mouth!
Immediately I cried out in pain, ran into the house, looked into the bathroom mirror and was horrified to see blood pouring out of my mouth and my tooth knocked loose. The next thing I did was the one smart thing I did: I screamed out, "Kristi!" But what followed that is a machine gun fire of shouts that I'm not proud of: "Oh I'm so stupid! Stupid! Stupid! Stupid! I'm going to lose my front tooth! How could I be so dumb! Why didn't I listen to Kristi when she told me to just throw the wood away?"
By this time, of course, Kristi had come running to the bathroom. Hanging up on the call she had been on, she looked into my mouth and then dialed the number to page our dentist. Then she turned to me tenderly and pleaded, "Bill, if I had hurt myself like that you'd have compassion for me. It was an accident. You need to be kind to yourself." She was right. It was a reminder for me to cooperate with God's care for me. I was fortunate that in the end that lesson only cost me a few days of pain and inconvenience and a hundred bucks, as my tooth was saved.
You've probably experienced painful circumstances much worse than my tooth accident. I have. And we know other people who have. A wife loses her 55-year old husband to cancer. A husband and three small children lose their mother to a car accident - no one was drunk or driving recklessly; it just happened. A woman in her 50's never got to be a mother even though she and her husband tried and prayed and went through years of getting help for their infertility.
Painful things that nobody intended and which weren't directly connected to anyone's sin just happen in life outside of the Garden of Eden. This is NOT God punishing you! Jesus made it clear that God allows undeserved tragedies not as punishment for sin, but as agents of spiritual change (Luke 13:4-5). And he allows undeserved disabilities not as punishment, but as opportunities to display his glory (John 9:1-3). We all go through trials to one extent or another and these are opportunities for spiritual growth (Romans 5:3-5) and may be ways that God is pruning us to bear even more fruit then we already are (John 15:2).
4. We experience pain when we choose to deny ourselves a desire.
There's a fourth reason for pain that you may have never thought of: Choosing pain. No, I'm not talking about masochism, a sick way of getting pleasure out of harming yourself. I'm referring to someone who chooses pain or stress for healthy reasons. Like recently, the night before Briana, my seven-year old girl, was to run a jog-a-thon for her school fundraiser she declared, "Daddy, I know I can run the most laps of anyone in my class because I can push through the pain!" And she did. Her determination paid off. Anyone who exercises does the same thing. They stress their muscles and endure pain in order to get stronger and fitter.
We can do the same thing spiritually. For instance, this year I returned to regularly practicing a spiritual discipline that I had neglected for years: fasting. Some people go without food for health reasons or to lose weight, while these are valid reasons it's not what I'm doing. I go 24 hours without food in order to feel the pain of hunger. Why? Because whenever I feel hungry I'm reminded of my deeper hunger for God and I go to prayer and I meditate on Scriptures like Jesus saying that we don't live for bread alone, but for God's Words (Matthew 4:4) and that his food is to do God's work (John 4:34). Fasting helps me to feed on Jesus as the Bread of Life (John 6:35).
Tithing money works the same way. So does letting go of worldly pursuits or even secondary priorities that are good in order to purse what is best, to seek God with a whole heart. Anytime a Christian endures persecution for doing what is right or for living as a Christian they are choosing to suffer. Missionaries are obvious examples of people choosing loss, stress, pain, or even martyrdom for spiritual reasons.
Suffering persecution may include being sinned against, but it's different type of pain because your ability to love is greater than your need for justice and there is an important opportunity for the offender to receive a Christian witness. Clearly, if your soul is being beaten down into a place of shame and fear then you need protection and care. And often offenders need to be confronted and held accountable. I believe these situations are different than a call for someone to endure the mistreatment of persecution for Christ's sake.
(Continued in part 4)
