pain

There used to be this policy in my family that we were never allowed to throw old schoolwork away. As a result of this policy I had a box of old school work dating all the way back to sixth grade. Being an adult I was recently informed that I now have the right to go through and get rid of any old homework I no longer need. I did so this morning. It was a very interesting job.

I noticed a drastic change about ninth grade. In middle school I was absolutely convinced that I was the stupidest, shallowest person in my class. Feeling that there was nothing I could do about it, I usually lived up to my own expectations. Then, in the middle of my eighth grade year, the private school relocated and I couldn't go anymore. Basically I lost my social life and saw my closest friend from the school only on rare occasions. I homeschooled (read: no classmates) I was very lonely and got pretty depressed. Then God began to pull on my heart in a new way and became my only Friend. My freshman year of highschool arrived and it seemed like big things just kept going wrong in my life. Too big for a fifteen-year-old to handle kinds of things. Stuff I couldn't do anything about. On top of it all I was shy and friendless. The next year, at sixteen I began going to a new private school. I no longer believed I was shallow with nothing to say. Looking through my old school assignments I see a seemingly sudden depth. I went into the new school still believing I was not very smart, and that I would be the kid who struggles to maintain a C average. This time though, rather than give in to a mediocre school performance I determined to try my best anyway. Turns out I had a straight A student hiding in there.

Why am I talking about this? I've been thinking about pain the last few months. Pain seems senseless. This is true no mater what kind of pain it is. A young toddler who bumps his head and cries probably doesn't understand or appreciate his pain any more than the man who loses his family in a car accident.

Not that I'm saying all pains and tragedies are equal; they are not. Only that in our own private little hearts our pain can seem so huge and overwhelming and impossible to understand. We ask why these things are happening. Usually it seems there is no answer to our most heart-wrenching questions. Only silence seems to meet these types of prayers echoing back our own pain. In the bigger struggles of just a few years ago I was guilty of crumbling under the weight of such unanswered pain. It's so hard to believe that God is still with me loving me when the whole world seems to be falling apart around me. When He doesn't stop it from happening.

Pain changes us in ways that we could never predict or appreciate while we are in it. At least in my times of greatest pain I can only see how it's ruining me. How I am weaker, more insecure, less capable than before. Often I have gotten angry feeling like God allowed pain into my life and then didn't even use it for good.

I'm starting to think of pain as a cruel shovel digging my soul deeper. Something that is made deeper can do two things. It can just be a bigger empty space and in that way merely highlight every past pain and the injustice of it all. Or something that is made deeper can be a bigger empty space that has a greater capacity to hold more of God's life. I've found the second to be true in my life. When I am honest with God about where I am and how I hurt, even how unfair I think it is; when I pray and seek to find God in the pain and know He is with me even when silent; when I trust Him as far as I can praying that He will build in me the capacity for trust I lack; when, to sum up, I focus on following Him however struggling that following may be then I begin to see my pains redeemed.

It is not anything I do. I am quite UNsaintly when it comes to enduring suffering. I can fall into despair and self-pity quite easily. Yet somehow God doesn't let us fall out of His hands - even when in our self-destructiveness we would jump out of His hands. Somehow despite all my anger and inability to understand pain, God uses it all to empty me further. Then, to pile grace on top of grace, once emptied God helps me choose to allow Him to fill me rather than focus on self-pity. Often in the middle of pain I feel like God isn't there, but it has been through that same pain that I have been allowed to glimpse His loving grace most fully.