The Gift of Pain
Have you ever heard of the idea of pain as a gift?
This concept may sound harsh at first but hear me out. Dr. Paul Brand and Philip Yancey wrote a book a while back called The Gift of Pain. They point out that a world without pain is no utopia.
We have learned this from people who have a medical condition where they cannot feel pain. It turns out that leprosy (yeah, the same kind that’s back in the Bible) is a disease that takes away a person’s ability to feel pain.
So when Jesus heals the leper, he’s restoring the man’s ability to feel pain.
People with leprosy end up with sores all over their bodies and missing limbs because, for example, they put their hand on a hot stove, not knowing it is hot. They step on a sharp rock and don’t know it. Then the cut gets infected, and they still aren’t aware. They walk around on it as it rots away, never having any motivation to take care of it. Get the idea?
What if the pain and even darkness we may feel in ourselves is not something for us to “overcome” as much as it is meant to guide us—kind of like that hot and cold game we played as kids.
God doesn’t have to give us a rule book on everything that is good and bad in the world (how many miles of pages would that have to be?!) because he has given us the gifts of pain and, on the other side, beauty and joy. They are like our own constant, internal guides saying, warmer, warmer, warmer..colder…warmer, hot, hot, hot!
I’m not saying the painful things that happened to you were gifts, but the fact that you register them as painful is, in its own surprising way, a gift after all.
Our emotions are literally our body’s way of communicating with us.
The gift of pain is also really similar to the gift of hunger and thirst. When we are hungry, our bodies are letting us know we need some nourishment, or we’re dehydrated.
It feels increasingly uncomfortable as it increasingly motivates us to move and satisfy our hunger or thirst. Ignoring our “negative” emotions is a lot like neglecting feeling hungry or thirsty...ultimately, not helpful.
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