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Please click on a question below.
# 1 What is pain?
# 2 What distressing fact does pain force us to acknowledge?
# 3 What is the deepest kind of pain?
# 4 What can happen if we accept our losses?
# 5 Why was I afraid to turn my will and my life over to the care of God?
# 6 What is the heart of the Cross?
# 7 How does the Cross of Jesus give us His New Life?
# 8 How can we find Life in the midst of pain and suffering?
# 9 Why is forgiveness so painful?
# 10 Can sorrow be a doorway to joy?
# 11 Can God bring good out of evil?
# 12 When will we enjoy freedom from pain or suffering?
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Pain is a warning sign. It tells us that something is out of balance. For example, if I break my arm, pain warns me that the normal unbroken condition of the bone is out of order. Pain warns me that I must do something to correct this, lest greater damage occur, such as might happen if broken edges of bone cut into muscle and blood vessels and nerves.
Pain tells us that something is out of kilter in the body (physical pain), or the soul (mental pain), or the spirit (spiritual pain). Pain is an urgent call to action, asking us to heed whatever is out of balance so that we can be restored to balance.
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Most of us assume our needs will be met — until we are in pain of some kind. Pain gets our attention! Pain forces us to acknowledge the distressing fact that, many times, people and things will not or cannot meet our needs and satisfy our longings.
Ultimately, only God is able to fully meet our needs and satisfy our longings.
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Rejection is extraordinarily painful. The deepest kind of pain is being rejected by those we love, rejected by those to whom we belong. Rejection (and/or an experience of abandonment) forms the bottom line of our deepest personal loss. Jesus experienced rejection in His betrayal, His passion and death. Also, He felt the pain of rejection when people turned from Him during His public ministry. In the midst of rejection, He stayed with His losses: in His daily living, in His agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, and in His suffering and dying. He did not escape by repressing His feelings. He let Himself be human and alive to His losses. And He did not use His divinity to protect Himself either. For example, after fasting for forty days in the desert, Jesus was very hungry. As God, He had the power to change the stones into bread. Yet He refused to use His divinity to escape from our human limitations and losses. He faced His losses as a man like us in all ways except sin.
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Accepting our losses facilitates the union of mind and heart. Accepting loss will integrate our thinking and our feelings. Without outward surrender to tears, it seems difficult for some of us to inwardly surrender to God by admitting we need Him and are not able to function apart from Him. In the Bible, tears and loss are often grouped together. Three things often work together to keep God away and guarantee that our mind and heart will not get together. Those three things are lack of tears, pride, and fear. They are dangerous because the integration of our mind with our heart is necessary to develop the heart and mind of Christ. Without tears at a deep level, we will be severely limited in our maturing and ministering to others.
We are called, then, to be with our loss — not to think or do something about it in order to escape it. We need to understand and experience that:
- someone or something we depended on for our security or significance, often in an unconscious way, is not dependable like we thought
- something we looked to, to give us the life we crave, can't give it
- loss of something or someone can result in loss of direction
- even when we surrender the loss to God, usually we will still suffer the pain of loss
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I questioned why I'd want to turn my will over to anybody, even to God. It was a trust issue. If I couldn't fully trust my parents, who “should” love me, how could I trust God? Certainly, I had wanted to trust my parents as a little girl. In many ways, they were wonderful parents, essentially trustworthy. Yet in other ways, they had fallen short. I couldn't fully trust my mother's love because of her apparent rejection of me during her outbursts of anger. I couldn't fully trust my father's love for me because he didn't protect me from my mother's anger.
On my wedding day, I felt so secure in the love and protection of my husband whom I trusted with my heart and my life. Unfortunately, in the early years, he proved to be untrustworthy. When important decisions needed to be made that strongly impacted my life, he often ignored my stated needs and preferences, making decisions based upon his wants, even his whims.
Experience taught me that it was unsafe to allow anyone else to have any control over my life, that they would hurt me in one way or another. Therefore, it was extremely difficult to decide to turn my will and my life over to the care of God.
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The heart of the Cross is trust in God. In the midst of its foolishness and death, its pain and suffering, we are left with no way out, except for trust in God….
One night, struggling with the loss and pain in my heart, I felt like I was cornered in a place deep inside myself. Over and over, I tried to find a way out of my inner distress. Within me I knew that blaming, excusing, anger, resentment or withdrawing wouldn't really work in the long run. Ultimately, I had to face that I had no way out except for trust in God.
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The Cross is bound up with loss of some kind. In one way or another, we have lost what we had. Or we face that we do not have or will not have, whatever gave us a type of life. We are left with no authentic escape from our Reality or our true condition. In some way, we will find our heart broken. And like Jesus, we go on in Faith because of the One in whom we place our trust.
For the sake of the joy that lay before him he endured the cross, despising its shame, and has taken his seat at the right of the throne of God. Consider how he endured such opposition from sinners, in order that you may not grow weary and lose heart. (Hebrews 12:2b-3 NAB)
The Cross of Jesus is an exchange in which Jesus takes our sins and wounds and gives us His holiness and healing. Jesus is outside of time yet present to us. He comes to be with us in our past, our present and our future. He is intimate with pain, tragedy, rejection and abandonment. He is intimate with being sinned against. As we learn to turn to Him and be with our heart in His Presence, we can receive Him into the darkest places of our life….
As we experience Jesus with us in the midst of our trouble, as we reflect upon our past, present and future, we receive from Him what we've needed so long — the glance, word or embrace of love that heals and affirms us.
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Everything in us naturally recoils from pain and suffering. In the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus prayed that, if possible, He would be spared from the pain of suffering and dying on the cross. Three times He prayed that prayer. Yet even when faced with extreme suffering, He chose to do His Father's will. It was in that choice — in agreeing to suffer and die — that He came to Resurrected Life. It is in His suffering and dying for us that we can find new Life. Like Jesus, when we put God's will first, when we choose to suffer if necessary in order to put God first, then we will find Life:
Then Jesus said to his disciples, “Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me. For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” (Matthew 16:21-25 NAB)
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Sometimes it is extremely difficult to give or to receive forgiveness. It can even feel dangerous or threatening in some way. That's because, in order to cancel the debt someone owes us, we must face and accept how we have been harmed or sinned against. The invitation to forgive another exposes our longings and our losses. Forgiveness invites us into the painful and difficult territory of embracing and canceling the harm and sin done to us, or by us.
Grudges and resentment are self-protection. They are tempting because they can keep us insulated from how truly we have been robbed and wronged. They can distance and protect us from how we long for what we have not had or found — or had and lost. Such insight can appear to be more dangerous than the damage of living with a hardened heart.
Minimizing is a self-protector. We can escape the requirement of forgiveness by minimizing the sin and damage done to us. This means that if we minimize, ignore or deny the harm done to us, we can pretend to ourselves that we aren't in pain. If we aren't hurt, then there is nothing we need to forgive. Some people minimize to avoid their fear of causing conflict with others or within themselves.
Some damage is impossible to forgive by my own power. I need the presence and power of Jesus that comes through my relationship with Him. My relationship with God is not a substitute for the sorrowing I must do. However, my relationship with God enables me to risk dying because Jesus died and He's alive. I trust that even though I die as I forgive, I shall live!
In order to receive God's forgiveness, we must forgive others. If we use unforgiveness or minimizing to protect ourselves from the way another has harmed and sinned against us, then we insulate ourselves from painful awareness of our hurt and damage. This insulation of our heart also insulates us from the heart of God and His forgiveness to us for our sins.
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Ironically, our capacity for Joy is in proportion to our openness to sorrow and loss. For years I prayed for Joy. Yet, I was afraid to go very deep in seeing the ways I have been sinned against and I have sinned against others. When I became willing to face the truth, I found painful new places of hurt, sorrow and loss — and wonderful new places of aliveness, hope and joy.
Grieving from the heart can be exhausting. It brings us to the very end of our own power and ability. Grieving makes us weak, vulnerable, poor — and receptive. Even though it's painful, the sorrow of a broken heart is precious, for God promises not to spurn a broken and contrite heart. Our sorrowful heart aches from the evil done to us and by us. Strangely enough, our hurting heart is the doorway through which we pass into joy.
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Yes! Over and over, I have seen God bring good out of evil. We find a biblical example in the story of Joseph, found in Genesis, chapters 37-50. Speaking to his brothers, Joseph said:
As far as I am concerned, God turned into good what you meant for evil. He brought me to the high position I have today so I could save the lives of many people. (Genesis 50:20 NLT)
I (Janice) can give you a personal example. My husband stopped going to church soon after we married. For the next thirty years, he did not go to church, except for weddings, funerals and other such occasions. During that time, he ridiculed me for my faith and mocked my beliefs. The persecution would ebb and flow. Sometimes it was an active aggression; other times it was a passive hostility. Always, it was a force trying to wear me down, trying to weaken my resolve. The greater the pressure, the more I turned to God for the strength to endure. The more my husband tried to hinder my faith, the greater my dependence on God became, and the stronger my faith grew. God can bring good out of evil!
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The day we arrive in heaven, we will enjoy freedom from pain or suffering. There will be no sin or death. In heaven, we will be both happy and joyful.
- Happiness is the contentment we feel in the absence of troubles.
- Joy is the peace we feel whether or not there are troubles.
We may have moments of happiness now, but complete and uninterrupted happiness will come only in heaven. In contrast, joy, a fruit of the Holy Spirit, is possible and promised for the here-and-now. Joy is the benefit of saying Yes to God. Joy is the result of embracing and doing God's will.
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