My pain my salvation

pain
noun.

1. a symptom of some physical hurt or disorder; “the patient developed severe pain and distension”
2. 2. emotional distress; a fundamental feeling that people try to avoid; “the pain of loneliness” [ant: pleasance]
3. 3. a somatic sensation of acute discomfort; “as the intensity increased the sensation changed from tickle to pain” Suffering or distress.
4. pains Great care or effort: take pains with one’s work
   

Picture the following scenario: you are on your way home from dinner one night, and suddenly as you transit home you feel a stabbing pain in your chest. The pain keeps building up and you finally collapse by the street, unable even to slump into a decent seated position. You are later awakened by a piercing pain between your rib cage. You awake and are surprised to see a man stick a knife in you, and then leave you in your own pool of blood. This causes u to pass out immediately once more. You awake once again, and this time u are able to sit up, but find that apart from the sting from the gash in your torso, you find your money is gone. Seems like you have just been robbed.

However, supposed the man was a doctor, and the alleyway was more like the corridor of a dimly lit emergency room. The man who stuck the knife in you was a doctor, removing a tumor or a blood clot in your chest cavity. After the surgery you fall once again under the influence of the anesthesia. You awake once more ‘healed’ and the doctor also takes your money – as surgery fees!

One same sensation and disturbingly similar ending – ergo your money in someone else’s hands – yet with immensely different results. One involves an artisan who weaves his stainless steel instrument in between tendon, flesh and bone to remove a harmful tumor. The other a petty thug who would stick his own grandmother for the bus fare across town.

My point is simple tonight. Pain, as implied in the underlined definition above, is merely a symptom. The same symptom that would quickly suggest that you draw your hand back from a hot oven lest it cause more severe and crippling burns. Just like drawing our hands away from intense heat, emotional trouble and pain also signal that something is not right within us; and that something needs changing before further more grievous damage occurs.

Yet our discrediting of pain has led many of us to all out avoid any form of inconvenience or pain. And ironically, this numbing and avoiding of certain pains hide from our vision the need to deal with tumors and wounds in our lives.

So we should always remember that we are given pain because we need to discover what it is that is not right. Is something wrong in your relationships? Are you not living in the right path? This pain is not forever, and normally our decision to handle it can determine whether the momentary suffering under our Divine Surgeon’s skilled hands placate the need for amputation or further suffering.

I have learnt early on then to embrace the painful situations momentarily – long enough to ask myself the deep probing questions, to discover why I am hurting. Nothing new lah guys. All been taught to us before:

James 1:2-4

2Consider it pure joy, my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds, 3because you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance. 4Perseverance must finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.

So not that i am into the whole whip and wax thing, but the end result of enduring the right kind of pain is completion, maturity, and promise of growth and a strengthened heart and mind.

Good night everyone.

~ by jaredtan on April 22, 2008.