2 Corinthians 1:5 – Pain Part 3 – Living with Pain
"For as we share abundantly in Christ's sufferings, so through Christ we share abundantly in comfort too."
2 Corinthians 1:5 (ESV)
Preface
This is part of a series of posts on the nature of emotional pain, what it can reveal about our hearts and minds, and the purpose it has in our walk with Christ. If you want the full context, start from the beginning.
Living with Pain
Unfortunately, even though we can have a better understanding of what pain tells us, it doesn't necessarily make pain easy to deal with. Pain is, by definition, difficult to tolerate. I ignorantly wish that having Christian wisdom meant killing pain, but the unfortunate truth is that we can only learn how to divert pain to turn it into growth. We can't really prevent ourselves from feeling what's meant to be a reminder of sin. Could we eliminate it completely, we would have to be living in a world free from sin.
Our flesh battles with our spirit – a lifelong battle that is the source of all "dishonest pain." That makes sense, because we're not meant to feel comfortable on the earth. The life of Christ is quite literally the perfect example of that battle, since He had to experience the biggest contrast between flesh and spirit that anyone's ever experienced. Scripture commands us to live for Christ. That means living lives in constant pursuit of looking like Him. So if Christ lived a life that was filled with excruciating suffering, it follows that the more we live for Christ, the more pain we may experience.
However, there's obviously more good that comes with suffering for Christ. For starters, it's so important to remember that pain is going to be a part of our lives regardless. The pain of living for Christ can be brutal, and extremely confusing. But the pain of living in sin, in addition to producing the same consequences, is unresolved. Sin is still there, but without Christ, we have no moral compass that points to true north. With Christ, while we're not exempt from experiencing the consequences of sin, we have the gift of being able to experience His comfort as well.
Still, the comfort that the Lord gives us still isn't necessarily meant to remove pain. I believe God comforts us by giving us hope that He's fully in control over all things, regardless of whether they're directly related to our own individual lives. That's something that I still don't fully understand yet, because I don't think I'm wise enough to understand how to find comfort in spiritual pain. Though I think a big part of it comes with understanding the wickedness of man, and the divine goodness of God. Because God doesn't hurt us. Man hurts man. We are beings created with sin etched into our hearts and minds, and that sin creates a self-serving design in us that leads us to cause pain in others (and even ourselves, ironically).
The comfort that Christ gives us is that our pain has purpose. Lewis states again in The Problem of Pain that we're a "divine work of art," that God won't be satisfied with until it has a certain character – a process that he refers to as the "intolerable compliment." In other words, pain comes from getting what we need, instead of what we want. God operates on a full and complete love, instead of just kindness.
"Over a sketch made idly to amuse a child, an artist may not take much trouble: he may be content to let it go even though it is not exactly as he meant it to be. But over the great picture of his life—the work which he loves, though in a different fashion, as intensely as a man loves a woman or a mother a child — he will take endless trouble—and would, doubtless, thereby give endless trouble to the picture if it were sentient. One can imagine a sentient picture, after being rubbed and scraped and re-commenced for the tenth time, wishing that it were only a thumb-nail sketch whose making was over in a minute. In the same way, it is natural for us to wish that God had designed for us a less glorious and less arduous destiny; but then we are wishing not for more love but for less."
Living with pain will always mean feeling the pain in full, but living with pain for Christ will always mean that as much as we're stretched, we find comfort in that it's casting us into the right shape.