Face the Pain

This is nothing profound...but it's on my heart today:

We say we wish we could just see God, physically, but what if the path to seeing God is through pain?

We live in a therapeutic culture, perhaps you’ve heard. We think we have a right to not have to feel our pain. You get a headache, take a Tylenol. You get a heartache, take some TV, movies, new clothes, new technology, you fill in the blank.

Sometimes the only way to see God is to feel your pain. Let Him speak to you in your pain.

Truth be told, it doesn’t really make much sense to me. Those heart-ache cures, while temporary, DO numb the pain. Sometimes it feels like God doesn’t numb our pain. We turn to Him, but we still feel the hurt and heartache.

Perhaps the fault with our distraction medication is the same with medicine. Most often, if it is a real problem, Tylenol isn’t going to cure it. It’ll help lessen the pain, but you have to get to the root of the problem, or you’ll just be dependent on Tylenol for the rest of your life, and you’ll probably get sicker. Our distraction medication is the same – it’s doesn’t get to the root of the issue.

When someone is fighting cancer, it’s a painful process. Sometimes they get physically sicker from the side effects of the radiation. Sometimes I think God has to use His own version of radiation to cure our heart-illnesses. And the result is that it hurts. But it cures the problem, and in the end, it was worth the pain.

Somehow, we’ve got to learn to face our pain, or we’ll just keep walking around as sick people getting sicker, and probably infecting others around us too.