Romans 5:3-4 – Pain Part 2 – an Uncomfortable Indicator

"... but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope ..." 

Romans 5:3-4 (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 haven't read the first part, I'd suggest checking that one out first for the full context. Or don't. I won't stop you.


Pain is an Indicator

Think of emotional pain as the numbers on a meter that gauges the status or condition of our spirit. Emotional pain is not the problem itself. It's a symptom of the problem.

When we get a physical wound, usually the first thing that comes to mind is the pain. That's how we know there's a problem and how bad it is. But oftentimes we misjudge what the actual issue is.

Dr. Priolo gave two great examples. Let's say you wake up in the middle of the night, from the best sleep of your life, to your smoke detector going off. You're shocked, confused, and even a bit annoyed. You were getting great sleep for the first time in a while – just for the smoke detector to pull you out of it. What are you going to do? Obviously, you can't get back to sleep until the smoke detector stops going off – so you walk over to it and beat the crap out of it until it stops beeping. Then you have peace and quiet, so you go back to bed and enjoy the rest of your sleep.

Or let's say you're unloading your dishwasher, and before you even get the chance to make much progress, you slip and fall onto the dishes. A knife sticking up out of the lower rack punctures your side, and you get a pretty nasty stab wound. It hurts really badly, and you felt fine before you fell. Obviously, you want the pain to go away, so you go into your medicine cabinet and grab some ibuprofen. If you take enough, the pain will go away. That's how it works, I'm sure. Then you can finish putting the dishes up pain-free.

What you want to say is "there's no way a rational person would think that way," but you'd be surprised how often we take that mindset when we experience emotional or spiritual wounds. We don't take the time to recognize the fire in our home or the blood escaping our body. When we're hurt, especially when it's the kind of pain that we're the most sensitive to, we resort to comforts over anything else. Before I go any further on that, understand that comforts can still be good; as I said before, there's no real "cure" for our pain, so sometimes it's important for us to comfort ourselves to assist in staying steadfast while we allow God to treat the real problem. While we allow God to treat the real problem. In both of those example scenarios, we end up destroyed. 

But then again, maybe we were sleeping soundly as the fire consumed us. Perhaps we felt no pain as we bled out on the kitchen floor.

Sorry for being so graphic, but I hope it helps to understand the severity of ignoring our flaws. When we refuse to look past the pain itself, we risk letting the problem that caused it to destroy us. God allows pain to exist to ultimately remind us that there's sin in the world. If we only try to suppress that pain, we're lying to ourselves that pain has no purpose but to leave us broken. When we feel deceitful emotions or pain, the issue doesn't lie in front of us, but inside of us. You have to feel your emotions – and your pain – so that you can find out where that issue is in you, and work with the Lord to fix it. You can't feel good all the time, because growing closer to God means learning that we're not good any of the time.

In other words, pain – like everything else in Creation – exists for multiple reasons. C.S. Lewis says in The Problem of Pain that "God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world." Our pain is the friction between our sin and God's perfect plan for our lives. It's super dangerous to view it as punishment or negligence from God, as opposed to seeing it for what it is: communication and instruction from God. Although pain comes from sin, God's still fully in control over it, as He is over everything. And anything that He controls, He uses for His purpose.

Will you put out the fire, and stop the bleeding? There's no guarantee that the issue won't come back, and we'll have to suppress the symptoms at the same time, but we can't afford to spend our time walking unwisely – the days are evil (Eph. 5:15-16).

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