C.S. Lewis wrote:
“God whispers to us in our pleasures, he speaks in our conscience, but He shouts in our pain:it is His megaphone to raise a deaf world. Pain insists on being attended to.”
I wanted to write a little bit about pain.
Now, some of us may shy away and try our hardest to hide and run away from pain. But we can’t just shut off pain right? We know that both pain and joy, you know joy, the thing that everyone could use some more of, pain and joy are two arteries of the same heart. If we awaken ourselves to true joy, we also awaken ourselves to pain.
Pain is something that bonds us all, because it is, on some capacity, a shared experience that has been felt by all. We all have felt or experienced some type of pain in our lives before.
So the question I’m left with is: how can we continue to seek the Lord in our pain? How can we allow the pain to bring us to a place of greater intimacy? Through crushed hearts, how can we continue to engage in relationship with the Lord in a way that brings us closer to Him and brings him Glory.
Because pain demands on being attended to. Because when it is isn’t, I have seen it plant seeds of bitterness and resentment towards God and the world. Pain swept under the rug creates a distrust, a disconnection, and ultimately, can break intimacy with the Father.
Job 1:21 “And he said, “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return. The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.”
Job 2:10 “But he said to her, “You speak as one of the foolish women would speak. Shall we receive good from God, and shall we not receive evil?” In all this Job did not sin with his lips.”
Psalm 69:29 “But I am afflicted and in pain;
let your salvation, O God, set me on high!”
I put these verses here to show that various characters in the Bible found themselves engaging with pain. It’s important to see these people in the Bible sharing with us in similar circumstances of pain and heartache. We can take great comfort in that.
In John 11, there is the story about Jesus’ friend dying while Jesus was away and traveling towards the sick man. When Jesus arrived, the people were in great pain because of the loss of their loved one. Jesus was moved by the people’s pain. He was touched with his own grief. In John 11:35, it says “Jesus wept.”
Furthermore, Hebrews 4:15: “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin.”
We see that even Jesus himself engaged with pain, and knows the sting of it.
So what does all of this mean? What do we do with all of it?
eat the manna
In the Old Testament, there is a story about the Israelites who were brought up out of Egypt, wandering in the desert. They were in the wilderness, and there was no food for them to eat. However, manna was bread-like food that formed every single morning with the dew; it was a 40 year long miracle. The word manna is literally translated as ‘what is it?’ They didn’t know what it was, they didn’t comprehend it and for 14,600 days, the Israelites took nourishment from that which they didn’t comprehend. They found filling and nourishment in the mystery. I read this and I think of the mysteries in my life that I have refused to let nourish me. But we can choose the mystery, we can taste it, we can eat it, and the manna, the mystery, is described to take like wafers of honey on their lips. This requires me to sit with the Lord and ask him, what are the mysteries in my life, and how is it that You want to nourish me through them.
biblical lenses
In order to keep the pain from warping our heart and breaking trust and intimacy with God, it is important to stay in Scripture. The bible is the Living Word of God, which means that when we read it and when we stay in it, it changes us, it changes our hearts, and it changes our eyes. Its the only book that actually has power. It’s the only book that when you’re reading it, it’s reading you.
Matthew 6:22 “The eye is the lamp of the body. So, if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light, but if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness.
Without God’s word as a lens, pain will warp our world.
Without a biblical lens to understand sickness, what we may see is: cheated.
Without a biblical lens to understand success, what we may see is: failure.
Without a biblical lens to understand when friends walk away from us, we may read: rejected or unworthy.
Without the biblical lens, it’s like the story is only half-written.
gratitude
Philippians 4:11: “Not that I am speaking of being in need, for I have learned in whatever situation I am to be content. I know how to be brought low, and I know how to abound. In any and every circumstance, I have learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and need.”
Paul says it twice, that He learned in whatever situation to be content. That means we will have to learn, and I think gratitude is a way for us to learn. Gratitude allows us to stop and give credit to He who gave us all things. Pain sometimes can cause us to only focus on all that is wrong, and all that is broken. And we see in scripture that it is good to engage with our pain, but I think God wants more for us. He wants us to see all the gifts He has given us as well.
We see Jesus giving thanks.
He gave thanks for the loaves and the fish, he gave thanks while Lazarus was still dead in the tomb, and the night before Jesus was betrayed he gave thanks.
From his thanksgiving, we see the miracle of the multiplication of the loaves and the fish, we see the miracle of a man raised from the dead, and we see the miracle of Jesus enduring the cross and raising again three days later.
Counting gifts for the small and trivial will also lead us to the language that gives thanks in the hard. We must learn the language that offers gratitude for sickness and divorce and death and miscarraiges, because that is the world that we are living in.
Gratitude is like unwrapping the gift given. Without acknowledgment, it’s as though the gift is just sitting in front of us but we don’t know it’s there and we don’t know who it came from. With thanksgiving we get to unwrap the gift and give glory to the Lord.
To summarize, God cares about our pain. He wants to use it to bring us into deeper intimacy with Him. Something will always come to fill the hurt and broken places in our hearts. When we engage our pain with the Lord, we allow His seeds to take root, and we allow His life to grow in those places. When we allow the Lord to nourish us with the mysteries, when we allow scripture to be our lens, and when we practice gratitude, we allow God to fill those cracked and broken places of our heart.
