We human beings are, by definition, fragile.

We have to admit —if we are truthful —that we can be confident and joyful one moment in our lives and scattered into pieces the next moment.

By ‘fragility’ I mean your human ‘brokenness’.

I mean the times in your life when you experience

• failure
• or the imbalances and downsides of your particular personality
• or psychological, mental, emotional, spiritual or physical illness
• or any kind of abuse
• or the unraveling of deeply cherished personal relationships
• or periods of despair or self-condemnation
• or any negative emotions
• or any kind of personal grief, trauma or loss

In each one of these crises, you feel pain. That’s entirely healthy, natural, and human.

But it can also be very human and natural to run from your pain.

That’s NOT healthy. Please don’t fall to this temptation.

Instead, discover how to let God find you right smack in your pain. When the experience of your human fragility is at its most raw, it’s especially important to know how to let God find you and love you! 

You see, it’s precisely at these times of extreme human fragility that your and my human instincts can utterly betray us instead of helping us!

They can sorely tempt us to try to seize control of our circumstances and bypass God’s supernatural help!

Saddest of all, in our strong urge to control our external circumstances we —often without even realizing or wanting to —end up controlling God too!

We, unconsciously, erect barriers that can keep God at a distance.

This attempt to control God, especially because it’s so often unconscious, is the greatest barrier to letting God find you; for in trying to control God, you prevent Him from doing His one and only job: the freedom to be God to and for YOU!

You keep yourself tightly coiled up like the proverbial hedgehog, your quills at-the-ready to defend yourself against anything you perceive to be the slightest inkling of further pain or grief.

In your efforts to escape further wounding, you end up blocking the only reliable, and easily available, Source of help.

The truth is completely different: God is to be found right in the middle of your pain, not somewhere outside it.

Your part is to honestly —and without any shame —acknowledge your pain.

When you practice praying with your heart for a few minutes every day, you build an unusually close bond with the Lord.

A mutual friendship gradually develops between God and you.

Mutual trust increases, until you reach the point where you can genuinely and with confidence surrender your pain and trauma to the Lord’s care and healing.

You are now more than half-way home to complete healing and resurrection.

I can’t say this enough: God taught me that lasting healing occurs when we invite Him into our pain.

Then we allow Him to help us surrender it gradually to His LOVE, care, protection, and healing.

Surrender Doesn’t Happen Overnight

Surrender doesn’t happen overnight.

In fact, when you’re just starting out, it can feel like a small death.

But it’s the kind of death that always and in every instance leads to new life.

The time will come when you no longer fear or run from pain but instead embrace your pain as an old friend who wants to offer you some very valuable gifts.

 One Non-Negotiable Pre-Requisite

for Healing Your Pain

 

Where your personal relationships are involved, there is a certain pre-requisite for healing your pain

It is forgiveness of those who have wounded or harmed in any way you and/or your loved ones.

Twenty-five years ago, in the triple-whammy of pain that I experienced from my husband’s betrayal, followed by a divorce, followed by a marriage annulment —I learned very quickly that if I held on to even the slightest degree of unforgiveness towards my husband, my peace of soul would quickly evaporate.

I would feel literally ‘bound’.

Here is one of my diary entries from that time:

“I am going through my own Kosovo**, viz: I am being faced, in a very deep and personal way, with an enemy who is intent on fighting and killing me and I must respond with love. That is the only way to stop all Kosovos. **

** Reference to the tragic ‘ethnic cleansing’ situation in Kosovo at the time

We heal our own pain —and that of others —only as we learn to bless our enemies with the forgiveness that true love requires.

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A Bit About My Own Journey Out of Pain

The journey out of pain can be distinctly bumpy.

In my own second experience of deep inner pain, the Lord began to work on me with the incisiveness and the decisiveness of a highly-experienced surgeon.

My Surgeon’s tools were razor-sharp; but it turned out that, as one might expect from a surgeon who truly knows his trade, this Surgeon use his tools with immeasurable skill, gentleness, patience, care, sensitivity, empathy and love.

Even so, like all fruitful and successful surgery, mine hurt!

The Surgeon invited me to confront the unconverted, heathen layers deep inside me, of whose existence I had in most cases not even been aware.

This can be very painful.

BUT you can bear it —and eventually even learn to welcome it —when you know that it leads to a cure and the lasting resolution of your ordeal.

How can you know that your short-term suffering will lead to resolution and victory?

You can know this when you understand that God ALWAYS desires your full healing.

How do you come to really understand this?

How can you make God’s healing a reality?

By spending a few minutes each day with the Lord in silence, praying with and from your heart. 

 

Scroll down to read a short excerpt on pain from my book

 

                         

An Excerpt from My Book

Here is an excerpt from my book, How I Learned to Let God Find Me in the Good Times and the Bad: A Spiritual Memoir. 

In this excerpt, I talk about the graces God gave me to deal with my pain:

God gave me another grace. This was my unshakeable conviction, then and now, that we never impress God by denying or hiding from Him our pain or our negative emotions or distressing problems. He knows them anyway. He knew us, after all, even before we were in our mother’s womb:

“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you…”

  Jeremiah 1:5 NKJV

 

And:

 

O Lord, you have examined my heart

and know everything about me.

You know when I sit down or stand up.

You know my thoughts even when I’m far away.

You see me when I travel

and when I rest at home.

You know everything I do.

 Psalm 139:1 - 3 NLT 

 

My conversion had to come from accepting, owning, and exploring my pain, not from retreating away from it or hiding it in some kind of ‘respectable’, pious or sentimental brand of so-called ‘Christianity’.

Did not Jesus say that He had come not for those who are well and don’t need a doctor but for those who are sick and do (Mark 2:17)?

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Read Part 1 of this article here. 

Read Part 2 of this article here 

                                   

 

 

 

 

 

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