Once in college I had a bad week where my shoulder injury was flaring up. Carpooling with some girls to a Bible study, I shared my frustrations. By this point, it had been several days of dull, aching pain and I was starting to feel pretty low. One of the girls piped up from the passenger seat and suggested that maybe I wasn’t praying enough for God to take my pain away.
To this day, I genuinely believe she only meant good by it, but her words hurt. The idea that my pain was somehow connected to me not being faithful enough. It bothered me enough that the next weekend I was home, I sat on my mom’s bed as she was resting from her own pain and told her about the whole thing. I asked her how she navigated situations like that and if there was any truth to what that girl had said. Was I just not praying enough? Was my faith somehow lacking?
It was then that my mom told me she’d stopped praying for God to take her pain away a long time ago and she didn’t think it had anything to do with how faithful or not she was being. Most days, she told me, her prayers were more about asking God to help her live through pain well.
My mom understood what takes many of us our whole lives to get. There are going to be things you ask God to take away that he doesn’t and that in no way informs on his goodness to us. Pain is part of the package. And it’s not because God is cruel.
The Bible is absolutely full of wisdom on suffering. Clearly God took the existence of pain and suffering in account with his plan for our lives. He is ready for it. He made a plan for it.
As Romans 5:3-5 puts it: “Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.”
Only in God’s hands could something like pain and suffering have so much opportunity for purpose and good. Our pain and suffering is one of the best opportunities we have to shine a light on who God is.
I’ve said this before and I will say it again and again. People will listen to what you have to say about God when things are good and going your way, but they will make their decisions about him based on what you say about him when you are losing or have nothing.
Because of my Mom’s outlook on pain, she was able to see how she could glorify God by living out her pain instead of always wishing it away. People who saw my Mom would end up asking questions about her faith. There were conversations she was able to have with people that never would have happened if not for her life being marked by pain. While I don’t think she enjoyed living with chronic pain, I truly believe she wouldn’t have traded those opportunities to witness for anything.
We have to train ourselves to look at the whole picture. By that I mean our lives as God sees them, stretching into when we join his kingdom, not just the short time we live here on this earth. Measuring God’s goodness by our earthly time would be like measuring the goodness of your entire life by a bad day. By looking at the whole picture, we see our pain where it belongs, a temporary struggle marked by incredible opportunity to glorify God. I can’t ask for much more than that.
The pain we experience in our lives is hard. I won’t try to convince you otherwise. But we need to challenge our perception of where that pain comes from in proportion to our faith
Let’s find some joy,
A
Avalon Robinson Author 