Living in chronic pain is a heavy weight on your mind. When you spend everyday in pain it blurs your thinking, you are short in your relationships, and you treat others poorly. I know because I have done all of these and worse. Much worse. You get angry because of your physical condition and you snap at others, people that you love. You don’t want to do this but you do because you are in pain.
There is an undercurrent of anger and despair, a riptide, that is always flowing under your mood. You do not want it to be this way. There are some days where you can exercise great restraint and keep swimming, sadly though, your mental strength gives way and the current pulls you under. Those days are hard because you misinterpret a comment or look from your wife, your children are just being children and you do not want to deal with it. Pain produces paranoia in me and my mind spirals to places where I have no place being. Relationships are affected, words are spoken, feelings are hurt. Anger.
You desperately want to go outside and play with your children but the pain is too much. You want to go hiking and camping but your body cannot bend and you are to prideful to ask for help setting up a campsite or saying you need a rest. You dread even going to the park. There are times when your wife wants to go out and you are hurting so bad but you know deep down she needs it but you still say “no”. You cannot bear the look in her eyes because you know she is tired of dealing with what you are dealing with. Anger.
You spend so much money on medications and quick fixes and lotions and you lose count of all the money that you have spent over the years. Have I mentioned anger?
Your are told to “hang in there” and “just pray more” and “insert whatever platitude here”. I know that people mean well but the truth is - people will never understand unless they have been in it. Then there are the people who scold you for not having a joyful attitude unto The Lord, for not eating a diet they would not eat themselves, and make fun of you behind your back because your neck stopped working years ago. Have I mentioned anger?
Some Sundays I just sit and stare at the two small steps that lead up to the pulpit in the church I serve. While the hymns are being sung I think about the pain I am about to feel by just walking up those two tiny steps. It affects your preaching and some days the sermons are short1, some days I have to lean upon the pulpit to hold me up.
God, are You there?
Why won’t you heal me? Some days I continually cry out to you while other days I ignore you. I’m angry at you. You know that I am and You love me anyway. You take all my hurt and all my pain and You give me glimpses of peace. You give me restoration and you give me forgiveness. When I do not deserve it. You whisper Romans 8:28 to me even when I do not understand how that fits into Your purpose. You show me Hebrews 11, men and women of great faith who stumbled and bumbled their way through life and I can only sit and say “Who am I? That You would think of me.” I wonder how Your going to take this little speck of dust and use it for Your glory.
Here is a quote attributed to the late R.C. Sproul:
“God allows suffering to come into our lives to refine us, as it were, to teach us how to be more and more dependent on Him.”
God, are You there?
“…casting all your care upon Him, for He cares for you.” 1st Peter 5:7 NKJV
Yeah, He is.
I have been made fun of by other Christian men for having “short” sermons. I guess God doesn’t work or move in people’s lives unless you preach for 45+ minutes. Who knew that I was hindering the work of an all powerful sovereign God.
That's so real and human. I have a lot of back pain from being overweight and doing a fair bit of manual labor and a lot of the part about being unkind to your wife and children hit home with me. I feel so guilty when the kids want me to play with them and I won't, I can't bring myself to say 'can't' not sure what that means.
Anyway, the weird thing about believing in a Sovereign God is that I have to believe that the pain and the tiredness and the grouchiness and all of that is part of the plan in some way, is good in some way. If it wasn't it wouldn't exist, right? There is a hard truth in there, that the Divine Artist likes to paint dark and sad scenes. I don't like it, but if He doesn't want to paint these scenes with these colors then why are there so many of them? If it is all our fault, then why did He make us a way that we would do these things? When bandits murder Job's children He says that the Lord took them away, in other words foreknowledge that merely precedes the event is one thing, but to freely create with foreknowledge is to create with intent.
I want very badly to be healed of my back pain, of the other crap that getting older is bringing with it, of the crap that 41 years of sin is bringing down on my body and my soul. I know that there is Someone who is able to heal me, who cares about me and has compassion enough to heal me, and who chooses not to heal me. That is where the little faith that I have leaves me. So many things that I wish He would do, for myself, for friends and family, for our country and our world. I know that he has the concern for us to take care of us, I know that He has the power to take care of us. All I can do is just yell, 'How long until you stand up for us?'
Anyway, I really liked and appreciated this piece.