Thoughts on Pain

Today marks thirteen days since my surgery and my twelfth day since being “grounded”—forbidden to put any weight on the ankle where I had surgery to remove hardware that was put there two years ago to fuse the ankle joint at 90 degrees in an effort to relieve severe ankle pain from PsA (Psoriatic Arthritis).  It has been two years of very bad pain and I can only hope that this surgery will help to alleviate that pain.  But there is no guarantee; it is kind of a shot in the dark.  If this surgery does not help I will have to just deal with the fact of crippling pain…in both ankles because, although I have not had surgery in the right ankle, it is in just as bad a shape as is the other one.  And there is therefore, best case, only one ankle that is usable.

Back – 12 days ago – a sister in Christ and fellow writer suggested I write 12 days of encouragement to my readers and to those who know me.  It has been somewhat of a challenge to find something to say every day, well mostly that is true of the past two days, yesterday and today.  For every other day, God presented me with a topic and I took it from there with the thoughts he gave me on it.  

Yesterday I went to church with my dad at his church.  And at my home church (which I watched later on Facebook), my pastor, who is struggling with sciatica, preached a sermon on suffering.  As I watched him draw on his experience of suffering---I thought back on the past, wow, 12 years of pain from this disease---and then back on the spinal injury/disease that I’ve suffered with for 35 years until now. Yes, that is right, I’ve been in terrible pain since I was 21. And I think that maybe I should have preached that sermon.

I pray for my pastor that God will allow him to arrive at the understanding of suffering he needs in order to do his job and care for the hurting in  his congregation.  I pray that he will understand adequately in a week or two rather than needing 35 years like me.

I am either very hard to get through to or God wants to take me to a new level---a depth of understanding that is plumbed only through decades of pain rather than weeks.  I hope it is the latter.  To have that kind of depth would be worth any pain for any amount of time.  Sometimes I think that I have not learned much.  Sometimes I feel ignorant of God's Voice amidst the pain and illness.  And sometimes I feel like the Desert Father who lived on top of a pole; no comfort anywhere to be found yet finding  God there and growing down deep in Him.

If I could speak anything to someone who is suffering, what would it be?  I think it would be "Jesus--only Jesus"...you need nothing more; nothing less.  To share in His sufferings.  To find Him in your sufferings..when there is no comfort to be found anywhere...like me sweating and crying in pain from a dislocated hip (for the 6th time), begging for medication to help me get through it.  And meeting Jesus there on that stretcher...finding that He is all I need.  If  He is there--any pain is worth it. "I can do (tolerate) all things through Him who gives me strength."  He meets me here, in my weakness. In night after long night, we sit here together.  Words are not necessary or maybe even possible.  But He is HERE.  That is all I need.  

Do not banish me from your presence,
    and don’t take your Holy Spirit from me. Psalm 51:11

In your strength I can crush an army;
    with my God I can scale any wall. 
2 Sam 22:30

Pain can be a wall.  It can be an army of enemy soldiers.   But neither of those things present a problem to the Lord.  His Spirit--the Spirit of Y'shua--is all that is necessary to survive and even thrive (in my spirit) is to burrow deep into His Spirit...when I breathe Him in and breathe Him out and that is all I can do; all I know: that He is as close as my very breath.