But I discovered something else about pain. It doesn’t just affect your body. It affects your patience, your emotions, your tolerance and your relationships. When you're hurting badly enough, it becomes very easy to become irritated by the smallest thing. A simple question can feel like an interruption. A harmless comment can suddenly annoy you. You become short-tempered with the very people who are trying to love you, help you and care for you.
And that's when God began to challenge me. I could allow it to make me angry, miserable and self-focused. Or I could allow God to use it to make me more compassionate and more dependent on Him.
Being kind and compassionate is easy when we're comfortable, but it’s much harder when we're in pain. The people around us shouldn't have to carry the emotional weight of something we are going through, especially when they didn’t cause it.
That doesn't mean we have to pretend we’re okay. Sometimes we just need to let others know we are struggling. Sometimes we need to step away before our frustration spills over onto someone else. Sometimes we need to apologise when we get it wrong. And sometimes all we can do is cry out to God: “Lord, please help me.”.
I have learnt that God doesn't always remove our pain as quickly as we would like Him to. Sometimes our healing is slower than our prayers. But even when He doesn’t immediately take away the pain, He can give us the strength to walk and push through it. When I kept turning my focus back to Him, I discovered that I could endure the pain without allowing the pain to take over.
And strangely, this season of pain has given me something I didn't know I needed: a greater compassion for those who live with pain every day.
Before shingles, I could sympathise with someone suffering from chronic pain, but now I can empathise. I understand something of what it feels like to wake up already exhausted. To wonder what level of pain the day will bring. To smile on the outside, while your body is fighting an invisible battle nobody else can see.
It made me realise that there are people sitting beside us at Church, at work, in our families and among our friends who may be carrying invisible pain.
Perhaps they don't need our advice; they simply need our grace and understanding.
Psalm 38:6–8 gave words to something I was experiencing:
“I am bowed down and brought very low; all day long I go about mourning. My back is filled with searing pain; there is no health in my body. I am feeble and utterly crushed; I groan in anguish of heart.”
David didn’t pretend he wasn’t hurting, and neither do we have to.
God is not offended by our tears. He is not disappointed when we admit that we are struggling. We can bring Him our pain, our exhaustion, our frustration, our fears and even our anger.
But perhaps our prayer doesn’t always need to be: “Lord, please take away this pain.”
But: “Lord, please help me to endure and push through this pain without becoming one.”
Because I may be hurting, I may be weary, and I may not always get it right, but with God's grace, I don’t have to become a pain to the people around me.
And perhaps that is one of the ways God redeems even our hardest seasons—
- By taking what is hurting us and using it to teach us how to hurt others less.
- By taking our suffering and turning it into compassion
- By taking our weakness and teaching us dependence.
So, if you are living with pain today, please don’t think you have to be strong every moment.
Cry when you need to. Rest when you need to. Ask for help when you’re struggling.
And most importantly, take your pain to God. You don’t have to let the pain define who you become.
With God’s help, we can push through the pain, one day, one hour, sometimes one moment at a time - and ask God to help us come through it softer, not harder; more compassionate, not more bitter; and more dependent on Him, not less.
Because perhaps the greatest victory isn't always that the pain disappears. Perhaps sometimes it is that the pain doesn't get to change the person God is helping us become.
