More on Pain

One of the last times I sat down and wrote, I wrote about Pain. It has been months since I did that, but in the meantime I started a job at an urgent care clinic. In the last two years at the hospital, and now at the urgent care I encounter pain all the time; pain in all different parts of the body, pain that is burning, crushing, or throbbing; pain expressed in all manners by people of all ages.

Recently there was a little boy who came into the clinic with a lacerated chin. He was not in much pain; in fact he had a lot of energy and seemed pretty happy, until it was time for the doctor to stitch his chin up.

The boy’s happiness disappeared as the staff “papoosed” him in a sheet to keep his body still on the bed. As the doctor began to clean the wound, the boy screamed and thrashed about, trying to free himself. He could not, since he was held firmly in place by several of the nursing staff. The procedure continued along, the doctor numbing the wound with lidocaine, then carefully working through each stitch to sufficiently close the wound. All the while the boy thrashed and screamed with as much energy as he could muster. When he discovered there was nothing he could do to escape, he screamed forth all the angry words his young vocabulary come up with. Eventually the wound was closed up, the area tidied, and the medical staff went on their way (to their great relief).

When I told my friend Tim this story, he thought about it for a moment, then said, “That’s pretty much the way we are with God.” How true! God knows better than we do what we really need, and usually it involves undergoing things we are convinced we don’t need. These processes involves pain in some form. But like a doctor, God knows in order for us grow and be healthy we need to go through this pain. Even our control must sometimes be restrained so we don’t spoil his work, and we must simply endure it.

Of being an ungrateful patient I am the guiltiest. I thrash, I scream and shout; I disagree with the diagnosis and fight against the pain with all that I have. And somewhere in this process the Holy Spirit reminds me that unless he does this thing, I will not get better. I have no choice but to submit to the faithful hands doing their work.

Consider it pure joy, my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance. Perseverance must finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything. James 1:2-3

God, help me to trust you.

The Hammering Process

Lately I read a book by C.S. Lewis called The Problem of Pain. If you haven't read this, I would highly recommend that you do; if for no other reason than that it can help to repair our broken understanding of pain and its purpose in our lives. I've included some excerpts here.

Generally when we endure hard times, we balk, we plead, we bargain, and we grieve. It is so hard to consider it pure joy when we face trials of many kinds (James 1). And pain: awful, painful pain; when it comes without respite, tries our faithfulness, even shakes our beliefs.

One of the first beliefs to go is that there is a God who loves us. But this is the fundamental error in our understanding of what that love means. We think that if God loves us, he must want us to be comfortable and happy, and that our every circumstance ought to support and foster that. This is simply wrong.

The problem of reconciling human suffering with the existence of a God who loves, is only insoluble so long as we attach a trivial meaning to the word ‘love’, and look on things as if man were the centre of them ... 

We may wish, indeed, that we were of so little account to God that He left us alone to follow our natural impulses - that He would give over trying to train us into something so unlike our natural selves: but once again, we are asking not for more love, but for less.

So this God who loves us, loves us enough to want what is best for us, and that is to be purified. If he didn't allow any purifying circumstances into our lives (aka pain), then he would actually be loving us less. Who really wants that?

When Christianity says that God loves man, it means that God loves man: not that He has some ‘disinterested’, because really indifferent, concern for our welfare, but that, in awful and surprising truth, we are objects of His love. 

You asked for a loving God: you have one.

This message turns modern American Christianity on its head, but it is the truth. How have we forgotten the struggles of almost every saint in the Bible? How have we forgotten that God welcomes men into his kingdom though much tribulation (Acts 14), and that in this world we are promised trouble (John 16)? Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to ... suffer. Did God not love Job, David, Paul, Peter, and even his own son Jesus, who suffered more than any man? Indeed,

He [God] has paid us the intolerant compliment of loving us, in the deepest, most tragic, most inexorable sense.

God loves us truly; he doesn't love us in some half-caring, dissociated way. He wants us to be conformed into the likeness of Christ, and the conforming hurts. It may be only in eternity, when we see the completion of this hammering process, that we finally understand the purpose for every struggle we endure here below. In the meantime, we must not forget what God's love means. We must not forget the One who endured the cross for our sake, and that following him at all, means to follow him there.