Pain and Hope

The Title of this post is a take on a post that my pastor, Alan, did called Forgiveness and Pain, check it out here: http://alankraft.wordpress.com/2009/08/08/forgiveness-and-pain/ .

In his blog he tells the story of a man wounded by those who had positions of trust in the missionary community. Abused and on the verge of slipping into the cycle of revenge and retaliation this man took a stand and forgave those who had hurt him and in doing so removed them from his heart. This removal process took away their power over him to cause future damage. The forgiveness process was the process by which he solidified his healing from the events and was, and is, what i consider one of the first and last steps of recovery.

The idea of forgiveness and pain is a very unique idea for me. If you follow my blog at all you know i have a condition that to this point has been diagnosed as trigeminal neuralgia. This nerve disorder causes me to have violent pain on the right side of me face. To understand the depth of the pain it is similar to getting tattooed. The pain is almost electric, it is cutting, it is hammering all at the same time. I have spoken to women who have the condition and they liken it to birthing pains happening on the face.

When i had seen Alan had written about pain and forgiveness i knew it was my place to talk about another type of pain and hope. In the case of Alan's acquaintence who was abused there was a direct assailant who had caused the harm. There was someone to forgive. With a nerve disorder there really isn't anyone to assign blame to. i don't feel particularly comfortable just calling it a spiritual attack, although it may be, and i don't really like judging myself and assuming that my condition is related to something i have done or not done. In the end, when i am not in the throws of wild eyed pain, i know that my condition probably doesn't have someone to blame. The ironic thing is that i have had people suggest that God is causign my condition, that they somehow link the disease to some sort of Job (fellow from the Bible) type affliction. Once again, i don't know if that is the case but it may be, really in the end no one will know what is causing my disorder, least of all me.

So what do we do when there isn't an entity to forgive? i now i am in pain, i know i am hurt and hurting. i know that right now looking forward there isn't a current plan of care to treat what i have. So what do i do? There is a lot of frustration in this place. A lot of struggle, a lot of nights where sleep escapes me mostly due to pain, sometimes due to worry. A lot of the times i find myself in tears begging the One just to know what happens next.

Then it hits me, what happens next is what is happening right now. The One, God, is near me. My family is near me, my friends are near me. But if only God were near me that would still be cause for something, not necessarily peace, not necessarily rest, but hope. i know our lives are supposed to be filled with peace and rest and the whole Psalm 23 thing but a lot of times that is just not the way it works. what we have then is hope, if God is near me i am where i am supposed to be. That in the moments of my most intense pain the One God is by my side. Never leaving, never failing. Do i always feel the One's presence? No. Often times all i feel is pain. Like today, pain has been my constant companion but the One has never left me.

In my heart there are times i want someone to blame. i want to be able to say "You did this to me! You have harmed me!" We always want a reason for the bad things in our lives but, as i intimately know, the reasons often alude us. We are often left wondering why. Why did so and so die? Why does such person have this disease or that? Why is this happening to us? All of these questions come from a place of intense suffering, pain, and loss. But when there is no one to blame we must hang our emotions and questions on hope. If not we will become, i will become, bitter, cold and brittle.

Most people associate Hope with desire, "Oh boy i hope i get that raise." or "i hope i get a high enough score on the test". While this may be a modified interpretation of hope these things are more like desires and wants. You can work hard and get a raise, you can study hard and get good grades. Hope is something different. Hope is what we need to have when nothing we can do has anything to do with what outcome happens. Hope keeps us from giving up or giving in even in the face of assured pain.

i know that right now, as it stands, i am going to experience violent pain in my face for the rest of my life. Would i like to be cured, to be healed? Yes, without question but it is not in mine to give. So does God fail me if i am not healed? Certainly not. You see, pain, while horrible, is not evil. The man who was harmed in the earlier story was caused damage through the sins of another and his hurts his wounds had to undergo a spiritual healing for him to be whole. i, on the other hand, have been given the path to walk that involves maintaining hope and faithfulness in spite of pain.

I have a tattoo on my wrists that is a capsule of the message the Apostle Paul gave to the Corinthians in his first letter to them. Of all the wonders of the spirit, all the grand things in the kingdom of God only three things will remain, Faith, Hope, and Love.

i am and have been at the breaking point for more than a year now. when it gets really bad, like it was today i am considering the worst of all solutions. then i remember that even though i hurt i am with God, and if my soul is eternally with God then there is somewhere right now where i am with God in eternity and not in pain. Hope is the evidence of things unseen.