I used to believe that pain was
mutually exclusive—unable to be shared because of its breadth and width and
length. Like an earthquake: the magnitude exponentially increased and at the
same rate, so did its ability to be understood and shared with another. So the
bigger the loss, the further beyond explanation, reasoning and ability to share
it went—until at some point the one who was feeling the pain (call them the
paine—haha) could not share at all what was happening inside them, only suffer
the loss in silence while others looked on—or even worse, at some point others
around them would have no idea that they were in pain and therefore wouldn’t
try to connect with them.
That was how I lived…so I reasoned
it must be the same, that this rule I had created in my head about my pain was
how everyone lived: bottled up, growing more and more unhappy, searching for
answers but beyond able to believe they were out there. A hell of my own
making. It’s how I lived through loving Haiti and various other challenges in
my life.
Until it became true—the pain was
so excruciating around my heart that I was locked into silence. Radio silence.
Inside a screaming wall, urging to be released but with a mindset that had me believing:
“No one can understand this. I have to face this alone—they can’t understand
it. This is my burden to bear.”
Until it became too much and the
floodgates (thank God!) opened as I learned that others around me are capable
of and knowledgeable about pain—the situations are so different (true) but the
same God is in the midst, teaching us how to have joy in Him, how to see His
face in the middle of the world breaking (thinking of the Haiti earthquake) and
choosing to love us through.
Pain—it is not mutually
exclusive—it is universal. It is not for ignoring and numbing into silence…the
Lord God who created the earth and every hair on my head sees my pain…and He
has made this world for FULLY LIVING—in the joy, the death, the hope, the
resurrection. Not pushing down and visualizing outside of our pain as some
religions teach, but entering in, with Him, feeling the shape of it, the depth
and width and breadth and the tang and smell and hope in it…the way it moves us
toward to a better country, helps us see that we are not alone: there are a lot
of people right here with us too. As His followers, I believe we are called to
be the ones who live present tense before those who do not yet know His name:
showing the grace of God and the agony of life in the way we walk out every
painful circumstance in our life that they may not only learn to mourn with us
and enter in, but they may also see: life is hard, just because you have
Christ, that does not end. But life is worth living and worth fully living
because when (not if, but when) you start hitting that pain, you also start
hitting that joy: the joy of knowing that there is a Saviour who goes before
you, to clear the nails and grit out of the way and show you His love, even in
the middle of the worst circumstances. When you lose your job…when your
children betray you…when your hope seems lost—the one thing you kept near and
dear in your heart is finally heartbreakingly free…The world will see how you
deal with your pain—they’ll see the shape of your loss before their eyes—and when
the grace of God comes in and overwhelms you with its goodness, it’ll overwhelm
them too.
So let the shape of your loss be
seen, live out your pain, in grace, in the middle of your life and those
watching—they will never be the same.
Because they’ll see Him there,
carrying it for you on a cross, and they’ll want the same.
This is indeed the Deepest Hunger…
