Turning To God

Turning To God

The pain turned you to God. –2 Corinthians 7:9 (TLB)

“I can’t feel my boo-boos,” five-year-old Ashlyn Blocker said through missing baby teeth she’d knocked out without a tear. Ashlyn is among a tiny number of people in the world known to have congenital insensitivity to pain. It’s a rare genetic disorder that makes her unable to feel pain.

“Some people would say that’s a good thing, but it’s not,” her mom said. “Pain’s there for a reason. It lets your body know something is wrong and needs to be fixed. I’d give anything for her to feel pain.” Ashlyn’s baby teeth posed big problems. She would chew her lips bloody in her sleep, bite through her tongue while eating, and once stuck her finger in her mouth and stripped flesh from it.

We tend to think of pain as our great enemy, the source of our unhappiness, and we assume that if we could just get rid of pain, we would truly be happy. But in reality, physical pain is a gift—an internal warning signal that tells us something has gone wrong and needs our urgent attention. Similarly, our emotional, relational, and spiritual pain is a gift, warning us that an area of our lives needs urgent attention to bring about healing. So perhaps the secret to happiness is not so much figuring out how to avoid all pain, but learning how to respond to it.

C. S. Lewis said, “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.” God uses the physical pain that does not subside, the relational pain that puts us on edge, the emotional pain that brings us to tears, to get our attention and to turn our attention toward him. Is that how God has used pain in your life? Do you find yourself praying more often, thinking more deeply, searching more urgently for the truth? When pain invades the busyness of our routine existence, it insists that we reexamine our assumptions and reevaluate our appetites and affections, doesn’t it? Pain often affords us—or imposes on us—time for reflection. If we will accept it, pain can give us the gift of reconnection with God, a fresh intimacy with him, a passionate nearness to him. Pain brings us to our knees. We begin with prayers for our pain to be removed. And as he works in us, our prayers change so that we begin to ask that the pain will be redeemed.

My Pain Redeemer, you have my attention! This pain has brought me to my knees and bid me turn to you. You are the pleasure I find in this pain. So speak to me and show me how I need to change. Heal the hurt in my life as I turn wholeheartedly toward you.

DIGGING DEEPER