Pain. This word is something the Lord has led me to chase after over and over again in the past few months of my life. Why would I want to chase pain? Well believe it or not, pain is actually a kindness. When you really think about it, the pain itself isn’t a problem, it is a sign of a problem. It tells us that there’s something wrong that we need to deal with. I don’t know if you know anything about leprosy, but it’s basically a disease in which someone lacks the ability to feel pain in their body. Someone with leprosy may be burning their hand on a flame, but they have no idea because the pain isn’t there to tell them to move it. In the same way, emotional pain is there to help you realize when something is bringing death into your life.
There have been times in my life when I’ve tried to block out pain and end up numbing my emotions entirely. I’ve come to realize that this is me trying to protect myself but in a very unhealthy way. It’s essentially a defense mechanism that ends up doing a lot more destruction than it does protection. Usually there is something that triggers it: a situation or person that causes me to shut down my feelings so there’s no possibility of being hurt. But what this is doing is slapping on a bandaid to cover up a wound that needs to be dealt with on a deeper level. The wound is probably going to get infected and start impacting other parts of my body. Me covering it up isn’t going to change the fact that it’s still there just beneath the surface. I have to actually expose the wound and let myself be vulnerable in order for it to be effectively cared for and healed. This process is one of the hardest yet most freeing thing in the world.
The enemy wants you to think that your emotions make you weak. He wants you to keep them hidden in an effort to appear “strong” to those around you, when in reality, hiding your emotion is a sign of fear. Whether that’s fear of how others may view you, fear of your vulnerability being turned against you, fear of conflict, fear that the Lord will be angry with you, etc. In reality, showing emotions is a sign of immense strength and bravery. Your emotions are actually a part of you that reflect the character of the Creator. You are made in the image of a perfect God who feels a full scale of emotions including those generally deemed “negative” such as anger, sadness, and jealousy. The truth is, there is nothing inherently bad about these emotions, it’s just a matter of how you let them affect you.
Jesus, fully God and fully human, felt pain and emotions more intensely than we may ever be able to comprehend, and He managed to never sin. He never sinned because unlike the rest of humanity, He never let His emotions separate Him from the Father. In Matthew 26, it says that Jesus went to the Father before He was crucified, and He felt sorrow to the point of sweating blood. Instead of hiding His pain and being ashamed of the fact that He didn’t want to die, He brought His emotions to the Lord and cried out asking if His burden could be taken away. Although He fully trusted God, He let Himself feel the pain and sorrow of the situation. He let Himself be broken before the Lord. Jesus knew something that I think we often fail to realize: His willingness to be vulnerable with His pain actually strengthened His relationship with the Father. Instead of trying to hold Himself together, He presented His brokenness before the Lord. Like Jesus, we need to learn how to press into the pain and bring it before the Lord instead of ignoring and running away from it. What God really wants is for us to draw nearer to Him in our pain so He can start putting our broken pieces back together into something even more beautiful than before.
This may mean you have to go back to a situation in which someone or something hurt you. In going back, you can actually bring the Lord into it and let yourselves feel the weight of the emotions you have been suppressing. It could also mean going back to a situation you’ve tried to run from because you failed, and you don’t want to deal with the shame of returning to it. The shame of those situations will always try to tell you you’re insufficient and you’ll never be healed, but God calls you blameless and promises that His grace is sufficient for you in all your weaknesses. Just because you’ve failed does not mean you are a failure. Your identity is not in your successes or your failures, but in Jesus. You can learn from the pain and mistakes of your past, but they do not change your identity.
So no matter what pain you may be running from, the power and grace of God wants desperately to heal it. Admitting you’re hurting is how you begin on the path of healing towards having fullness of hope and joy, if only you are willing to take the first step and bring your brokenness before Him. It may be a long journey as healing takes time, but you’ll never truly grasp the beauty of what it means to stand on top of a mountain until you’ve trekked through the valley and made the hike all the way from the bottom to the top.
-Abby
