What a Pain!
Have you ever been in pain and felt as if nobody understands? To my shame, I have to admit that I was one of those people who couldn’t always relate to your suffering. You would think that having bronchitis at 10 years old, fracturing my left metacarpal at 16, and ripping a tendon in my right leg at 17 would have given me a reasonably good definition of pain—not so! Despite these episodes of extreme discomfort (the bronchitis being the worst), I never felt that I could relate to those suffering ongoing pain—until, that is,…I pinched my sciatic nerve about 5 years ago! I had finally reached the true state of ‘Human Empathy.’ The pain lasted the 6 weeks that my doctor said it would. But for weeks to come I lived in constant fear that my leg would collapse out from under me at any given second. So, to all of you good souls out there who live with pain and discomfort, day in and day out, I truly do feel for you.
In my early days as a Christian, someone gave me a set of cassette tapes by John N Clayton. One of them dealt with the problem of pain and suffering in light of a loving God. Probably his best work, I think. One of his main points being that pain is part of a God given physical warning system to signal abnormalities in the usual functioning of your body. Without it, and tragically, you might just fade away, and no one be any the wiser. Jesus went through physical, mental and spiritual pain to save us from an eternity of spiritual agony. Did he have to do it? No! Did he want to do it? Not if there had been another way! Did he willing do it? Yes! Why? Because without it we would have received all we deserved.
Jesus did not come to judge the world—we were already condemned. He came to save it. Praise God, glory hallelujah! Being a Christian does not spare you from the physical, mental and emotional pains of this world. However, it should be a given that godly living reduces the effects of sin markedly. Despite the hype to the contrary, you just don’t find booze, drugs, an unhealthy diet, an immoral lifestyle and bad company being offered as solutions to anything. You know, the one thing that Christians are spared—the pain of eternal spiritual miseries—both here and beyond? Take it!
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