Making Pain Work For You

There is one thing that you must accept in this life.  Pain, heartbreak and tragedy will touch you at some point.  We are not afforded permanent insulation from the undesirable sting of loss while we make our way through life.  We are a fallen people living in a fallen world next to other fallen people.  It is still true that the wages of sin is death and not until Christ comes to restore all things will there be full freedom from gut-punching, breath-stealing pain.  Since we accept the fact that hurt will find us, what should we do with it once it does?

“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God.” – 2 Corinthians 1:3-4 {ESV}

Some of you will have already heard the tragic story of the Cretzman family, young missionaries to Cuba.  A few days ago they were traveling as a family in Ohio when their van hit some black ice which resulted in a terrible wreck.  Matt was uninjured while his wife, Lana, suffered serious injury but is now stabilized after surgery.  Their youngest daughter was miraculously uninjured in the wreck but, heartbreakingly, their three-year-old daughter Azlynn did not survive.  Servants of God, in the will of God, leaving America for Cuba with the Gospel, must pause to bury their baby girl before her fourth birthday.  I tighten up just typing that out; few of us know their pain.  I will be careful not to pretend that I understand their experience fully.  Yet, I do know the reality and numbness of tragedy and loss…and so do you.

God intends for your pain to become useful – all of your losses are to be employed for the good of others and the glory of Christ.  Most of you who read my blog are followers of Christ and can understand what I am writing today.  Those of you who are not Christians will likely struggle with what I’m saying because you may believe that, if God is truly a good god, then His foremost obligation is our comfort and happiness.  You would believe that pain is incompatible with a benevolent supreme being.  Truth be known, God created man in the way that you think.  Sin marred God’s design and now we live in a corruption of the original plan of God.  There is coming a day when God will restore all that is now fallen but, until then, we will journey through jaggedness.    The expectation and empowerment of God is for His children to utilize the unavoidable suffering which comes our way.  We are to make it a purposeful part of our life-journey.  Not wishing to sound overly stoic, I will hazard this statement: Since pain is going to be our reality, why not employ it for someone elses good? Some people choose an alternative route which falls short of God’s design:

Some people grieve without hope.  Some people become bitter towards God.  Some people take their identity in the loss and make themselves the center of focus.  Some people falsely believe that nobody can understand.  Some people allow themselves to feel cheated and become hard-hearted.  Some people live in fear of future pain and, consequently, stop living a meaningful existence.

Yet some others take to heart what Paul wrote to the Corinthians above and take the comfort that God gives them and employ it in the ministry of comforting others.  This is the will of God for you when you experience painful loss.  Make your pain a tool instead of allowing it to be a tyrant.  Put a harness on it before it puts a saddle on you.  Teach yourself that your very real pain will make a profitable servant but a lousy master.  Since your pain is not going to magically disappear, make it work for you.  Better still, make it work for His glory.

I’ve contacted the Cretzmans and will seek to get involved in doing what we can.  That’s what many did for our family last year when the greatest trouble of our lives found us on June 16th.  Now it’s our turn to be on the giving end.  Now we can take what ministered to us in our pain and send it forward to minister to a precious family that has a mom in the hospital, a dad in a powerless state of being and a little daughter’s body awaiting burial.

Yes, we have pain.  But God has us.