Concerning SM, there are different types of pain – the dull aching kind that you can pretty much ignore and the more achy kind that’s harder to ignore. Then there’s the shooting, stabbing down-on-the-floor kind of pain. This pain comes on suddenly and shoots up and down my spine. Sometimes it only lasts a few seconds then leaves me. Other times it comes on repeatedly, one stab after the other. This is when it becomes increasingly difficult not to scream.

When we start talking about “face-on-the-carpet-pain” in our doctor’s office, we are given a prescription. Oh I’ve been given plenty of those. But a pain management tool prescribed by a doctor such as a pain-killer is temporary. The pain always comes back.

My friends, what is really, truly comforting to me in those times of severe pain, is the hope I have in God through Jesus Christ. The following is an excerpt from Tim Keller’s book Walking With God Through Pain and Suffering:

Plenty of people have been broken by suffering, terribly broken. So what do you have to do in order to grow instead of being destroyed by your suffering? The answer is that you must walk with God. And what is that? It means we must treat God AS God and AS THERE. Of course that means to speak to him, to pour your heart out to him in prayer. It means to trust him. But preeminently, it means to see with the eyes of your heart how Jesus plunged into the fire for you when he went to the cross. This is what you need to know so you will trust him, stick with him, and thus turn purer gold in the heat. If you remember with grateful amazement that Jesus was thrown into the ultimate furnace FOR you, you can begin to sense him in your smaller furnaces WITH you.  (emphasis mine)

Sometimes for very practical reasons, I need to take a prescribed pain-killer for my physical pain. But a pill wears off and the pain returns. This frustrating cycle could very easily lead to major depression but my hope is secure in a deeper understanding.

     2 Corinthians 4:16-17

So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison. 

Journey with me.