Faith

I have continued the same theme from yesterday. I wanted to think about God and the problem of pain and suffering. We each tell ourselves that we should not experience pain and we never should have any suffering. However, pain has been developed by God for a reason. Phillip Yancey wrote a book a while ago that was titled God and the Problem of Pain. In this book he described staying with Dr. Paul Brand while he treated patient with leprosy. Leprosy is a disease where the nerve endings of the body do not feel pain anymore. Since these individuals do not feel pain, they have the horrible disfigurments that are associated with leprosy. They hit their hands, cut their feet, break their arms, and never even feel it. Then they develop infections and other problems because the warning system of the body is turned off. There is nothing telling them to get help or to stop with a certian behavior. Yancey told a story of not being able to get his room key to turn one night. Along came someone who said that he would help and turned the key with no problem. Yancey said that he looked down and the man had cut his finger to the bone, but did not even know that he had done that. Leprosy patients also decribe their hands and feet and disconnected from their bodies and they see them more as tools rather than something connected to themselves that they need to take care of. Pain is the body's warning system to let us know that something is wrong. It is there to let us know that our physcial body is hurting and that we must seek help to stop the process from continuing to a horrible conclusion. We must have pain so that we do not allow things to hurt us more and get worse.
This is how it also works emotionally with us. We need pain, physical and emotional, to warn us. It needs to be there to let us know when to make a different decision, to stop the way we are thinking, to ask for help. If we try to ignore our pain, things just become worse. Think of the addict who is attempting to numb their pain with the use of some substance. The more they ignore the pain of life, the worse the problem of addiction gets and the worse life becomes. We make this even worse when we say to ourselves that we should not experience pain and this should not be happening. We do not think of our pain as something that is giving us information, rather as something to avoid. When we do this we actually increase our suffering. We begin to look outside of ourselves for the causes of pain - our marriage parnter, our boss, our job, our financial situation, our family, our friend - rather than looking at how we could change our thinking and view our pain in a way to help us decide something different so that we can stop the pain. This gets even worse because we begin to see others as "tools" to be used rather than as a part of us, connected because we are all created with the image of God, and damage others.
Faith is understanding that God is letting us know how to stop suffering by giving us pain. When I burn my hand in a fire, I no longer purposely place my hand in a fire. When I can decide to think about and take different actions in my relationships, work, and financial life I can reduce my suffereing. We also forget that what connects us all is our pain and suffering. We can help each other move through it, give each other feedback about what to do differently, and just comfort one another when it happens. Faith is understanding and accepting that God has worked everything to perfection and for our good, even suffering. Do we have to like it - no! Does it take away the pain - no! Does it connect us - yes! Does it help us change - yes!!

By entering through faith into what God has always wanted to do for us—set us right with him, make us fit for him—we have it all together with God because of our Master Jesus. And that's not all: We throw open our doors to God and discover at the same moment that he has already thrown open his door to us. We find ourselves standing where we always hoped we might stand—out in the wide open spaces of God's grace and glory, standing tall and shouting our praise.
There's more to come: We continue to shout our praise even when we're hemmed in with troubles, because we know how troubles can develop passionate patience in us, and how that patience in turn forges the tempered steel of virtue, keeping us alert for whatever God will do next. In alert expectancy such as this, we're never left feeling shortchanged. Quite the contrary—we can't round up enough containers to hold everything God generously pours into our lives through the Holy Spirit! Romans 5:1-5

Learn from your pain, change what you are thinking and doing, and change your life. Change what you think about and things change.

Namaste'