How Pain Knocks Some Sense into Us

Sunday, the trunk attacked me as I was getting something out.

I wasn't paying attention and didn't notice it wasn't raised all the way, so when I let go it konked me in the head. Today is the third day and the swelling has gone down but it is SORE! Combining that with the bandaged biopsy spot on my nose, and I for real look like I’ve been in a fight! 

And I have, of a sort.

The enemy plays really dirty and does not mind adding insult to injury. 

We know this, but we often get distracted and don't have our defenses all the way up, and so we get konked in the head.

I think it's easiest to get distracted in the waiting periods.

I am currently in a waiting period...the middle...of finding out my biopsy results from 3 spots. These three new scars are added to roughly two dozen others I have had in my lifetime. This will make the 4th scar on my face. The last one, three years ago last month, was the first one to come back positive for cancer. Scars are never fun, but the others were easier because I didn't really worry. Now I do. Last time, I had to have MORE surgery, and bigger scars. It was serious and scary. That makes facing it this time harder. This waiting for the phone call results is tough and, well, I have been fighting against despair and sadness and worry. And vanity.

These can all be distractions.

It’s a strange experience to undergo surgery on your face. To know there's a chance that, afterwards, you might not look like the you that you knew before the surgery. It's a hard thing to know you'll have a daily reminder of what happened staring you in the face.

Worry. Distractions.

As a sixteen year old girl, God gave me a verse that has become my life verse. It's not a feely-good empowering verse! It's a tough one to swallow. But God, in his mercy, wanted me to have hope. So he plastered Psalm 119:71 over all my scars. "It is good for me to be afflicted, so that I might learn your ways." 

These last few years, on different levels, have been tough on my self-esteem. When you don't think you struggle with vanity, beware...you may get konked in the head while you are distracted! 

I realized I was already struggling with feeling pretty before, and now I have to walk around with stitches and a bandage on my face. Worry. I have started thinking through the reality that I might have to get part of my nose cut off, and I have realized how vain I really am.

It's like a big konk in the head. A bruise to the heart.

Sunday’s message at church (ironically RIGHT after the trunk attacked me) was about having hope in suffering. 

My Pastor said: “Suffering and pain have a great power to do things to our heart. Bad and good. It can equally stir up self-centeredness and sin and also maturity and inspiration. Pain stretches us.”

It stretches us.

It konks us in the head and the heart. 

I have found myself praying more than once in the last few years, over different areas, faced with things that could be very hard, “God, please don’t let this be my story?” I understood in those moments that those hard things could be good, could bring glory to God. But it still didn't mean I wanted to pay the price if I didn't have to. It’s hard to walk in hope knowing things may NOT turn out how you hoped. Today, as I thought that, I thought about Jesus praying in the garden the night before he faced pain and torture, about him asking God to let salvation come another way if at all possible for him to avoid the pain of the cross, and yet then he said, but no matter what, YOUR will be done.

That's powerful on so many levels.

I WANT to accept God’s plan, like Jesus did. But I also find a measure of comfort knowing that even Jesus said, "God, if it be possible, please don’t let this hard thing be part of my story?"

It's that waiting period. That hard part of thinking, this might be really painful, and I don’t want to worry before I know. But it’s hard. I don’t want to freak out when/if I get the bad call. It’s hard. I don’t want to have part of my nose cut off, or have more cancer. It’s hard. Life is hard.

It is.

But God is good. I CAN trust His plan.

Today, I am praying that you and I both will rest securely in His plan in our lives in all the hard places right now. That we will be able to pray like Jesus, “Father, if You are willing, take this cup from Me; yet not My will, but Yours be done.”  — Luke 22:41-42 

Light gets in best in the broken places. Scars can create deeper healing. Scars are places the bad stuff has been removed. It's pain with a purpose.

Some knocks happen to knock the bad stuff out and make room for the good stuff!