As you may know, I have been recovering from a broken leg. I saw the doctor today and he said I'm near the end of that part of the recovery in which "other people can help me." In other words, It's all up to you, buster. Up to me and my God.
Going from not putting weight on the leg to walking with the help of a walker to doing so with the help of a cane, to walking without the cane (for the most part), all in a few weeks, has been exhilarating, in a way. God's ability to heal bone, to heal our bodies, is amazing, let alone grace-full. But now comes the hard part.
Not "hard" in the sense of physically hard. That I have been through -- trying to get around without the use of a leg. No, now i have reached the stage where all I have left is the mental difficulties. By that I mean: I can get around now, with a limp. Over the next year, will I be able to get beyond the limp? Or will I allow the bit of pain that is, in a sense, causing me to limp, to keep me from trying harder?
Pain is an interesting thing. God gave us the ability to feel pain so that we would know we were hurting, and to warn us -- a la touching a hot stove -- from doing something dangerous again. Pain is, in its most elemental sense, a good thing. But, like any good thing, it can be misused. People can ignore pain to the point of recklessness. People can fear pain to the point of being paralyzed, to the point of doing nothing with your life. This is the difficulty of living with pain.
One way we can deal with pain is with humor, and I recommend that, but only under certain circumstances. A person can laugh at his own pain; whether someone else can, is an iffy proposition. Goodness knows we LIKE to laugh at someone else's pain at times -- there's even a name for when we laugh at violent behavior -- slapstick. Then there's the sinful glee we sometimes take in the demise or punishment of our rivals or enemies. The Germans even have a word for that -- schadenfreude.
I remember once when I was a teen and it was my job to get out the snowblower and clear the driveway. Little did I know that a women's dead body was lying only 10 yards from me at the time -- the night before, during the snowstorm, she had driven her car into a nearby ditch and walked over to the front of our lawn and collapsed, dead of a heart attack. Pulling out of our (now cleared) driveway, my father saw the body. Soon the EMTs were there, and pronounced her dead. I came to school that day just bursting to tell people the news. Now I'm not criticizing myself for telling, say, my close friends, "what happened to me today." But I did more than that: I told everyone I met, full of what I realized was a kind of attention-getting glee. I was taking advantage of the pain of this woman and her family.
I was reminded of this when I read an Agatha Christie novel in which some boys want to see a dead body lying in the barn belonging to one boy's family. The police kept them away. They pleaded, "Oh, sir, please sir, do be a sport. It's not fair. Here's a murder, right in our own barn. It's the sort of chance might never happen again. Do be a sport sir...." And they let the boys in.
Pain is something, one way or the other, that we would like to ignore, or avoid -- either by running away from our own pain, or laughing off the pain of others. Yet we must deal with the reality of pain. Jesus did. When He saw someone else in pain, He healed it. He had the power. But it started with Him noticing it, and being fully aware of the reality of pain. When He saw a woman, bent over for 18 years of pain, He healed her, without her even asking for it (Luke 13:10-17) He knew that one day, we would be in a place, with God, where "Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away." (Revelation 21:4)
In the meantime, before that great and good day, let us meet the test of pain head on. We shouldn't ignore it, deaden it, make fun of it, or run from it. Pain is a sign that something needs to be done -- something good, and soon -- and if we can't get rid of it, at least talk about it, acknowledge it -- at least to God. Perhaps that is the greatest power of prayer.
David Hewitt
