You Are Not Your Pain

You are not your pain. Don’t let a season of struggle, suffering, or grief become your identity. The last thing I would ever want to do is diminish someone’s journey, or make the mistake of assuming that everyone’s pain and recovery process are the same. They’re not. But you rarely think that you could become dependent on pain until you already are. When you look at life through a wound, physical or emotional, it’s easy to get consumed by the bitterness of why it’s happened to you, and drained of all your energy trying to protect yourself from getting hurt further.

Many people have physical limitations that they brilliantly overcome by seeing what is possible, especially from God’s perspective, and determining to go after it. But if your hopes and dreams get focused on what could have been, and imagining what horrible thing might happen next, then your pain can become an excuse for not going forward. You refuse to take all the steps you need to really heal- just enough to numb yourself. You stay in that place, slowly wasting away, even rationalizing that it’s God’s will, the cross He has given you to bear. You walk in little circles, telling yourself that you’re moving ahead, but you’re just wearing away the ground, slowly digging an ever-deepening hole.

In Mark 10, a blind beggar hears that Jesus is near, and calls out to Him repeatedly. Jesus asks the blind man what he wants. That seems like either a stupid question, or a cruel one. But it’s actually brilliant and merciful. Jesus knows what the man needs, but the man needs to hear himself say it. He has been a beggar for years, maybe all his life. It’s his identity. It’s all he knows. To have his sight means the end of the only way he knows to live. But he believes there must be a better one. He said to Jesus, “Sir, that I may receive my sight.”

Jesus responds with something amazing here- “Go your way, your faith has made you well.”
He didn’t say, “I make you well”, but “your faith”. The man’s belief that there was a greater reality possible, and that Jesus was the way to that reality, healed his sight. I don’t know exactly how that all works, but he partnered with Jesus in his own healing. He agreed with Jesus’ view of his life, instead of going back to the security of what he had thought all his life, and what others had judged about him. In choosing to trust in God more than his pain, he climbed out of his hole forever.

Your turn.