“So, did you faint the first time you saw a body cut into?” I asked my surgeon friend.
“Almost”, he replied. “The nurses gave me a stool to sit on until I could pull myself together. It was a hysterectomy, and I was in pre-med.”
“Now I can cut without a problem because I know that what I do saves lives.
“But cutting into flesh — is not normal.” I press the topic.
“ Cancer is not normal, tumors are not normal, birth defects are not normal. Sometimes you have to face the problem with an answer that causes pain. But you press through the pain to find the healing.”
I sometimes look at pain in my life as if something unfair and exclusive to me alone is occurring.
Appears to me as if life has decided to single me out for things that are unfair, for things which don’t make sense, for things that try to destroy my confidence in what Christ has done in me and through me.
Does this sound familiar to you? In talking to many women, I have learned that my pain is not exclusive to me . Many women feel this way.
The feeling of being a failure, like we are not good enough, or creative enough, or sometimes it feels like our imperfections are like personality birth defects, or like cancer that is destroying our lives from the inside.
Yet God’s word says we are perfectly made. Is God a god of errors? Either He is God or he is not! We must choose.
And we must choose before the day of pain arrives. How else will we survive, if we do not believe that we will see the goodness of God in the land of the living? (Psalms 27:13)
My friend pauses our conversation. He has a problem with his back, he holds onto the wall as he gently lowers himself into the chair. Pain is a companion uninvited, always present, and residing way too long. Yet my friend, smiles; never a harsh word, nor a response that could ricochet through the room. Gentle and steady he goes along. The pain does not change him, but it transforms him.
Pain has a way of doing that. It chisels us, carving out hues as it sculpts what is plain and unrecognizable into an image quickly acknowledged.
So many times it is tolerable to press through the pain if we know there is a reason. And here is one of them,
“Therefore we do not lose heart, but though our outer man is decaying, yet your inner man is being renewed day by day.” 2 Corinthians 4:16
Pain has a way of drawing us closer to Christ, and if we allow His work to be done in us, the work of pain will begin cutting away the decay, and revealing the new, day by day.
Pain in this life, is normal in this abnormal world. It cuts through the tender covering of our soul to reveal, to heal, and to produce for us an eternal weight of glory far beyond all comparison.
We see and feel pain and resist, yet how do we know that it isn’t God positioning our lives for a greater blessing?
Pain is an opportunity to see God move in ways that we could never have seen with a pain-free life.
Can we together count our blessings, can we learn to count it as joy?
I am so thankful for you, lifting you in my prayers daily.
~Di
Linking with Raising Arrows, Imperfect Prose, Write it girl
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I needed this right now. I need to be grateful for my many blessings and wait for what he had instore for me.
I know Megan, Hold on my baby girl, hold on. I love you!