This familiar pain

I can’t take all credit for this entry. In large part the catalyst was Emily’s hauntingly beautiful recent post. That… and a doorknob.

“Ouch!”

Grimacing, I looked down as I withdrew from my previous course, as if I expected to see some immediate physical change as a result of having run into an unpleasant object. The sensitive nerves inside my hip bone screamed through the rest of me. I recoiled and remembered – being nineteen, so proud to be the youngest member of the Heritage summer intern program, excited beyond measure to be living in D.C. – and how often I’d run into these daggum doorknobs. Something about the situation of the bathroom doorknobs and my height never came to an understanding. I was simply left with pride slightly more wounded every day, accompanied by a perpetual tender bruise.

For the last couple Thursdays, I’ve had the pleasure of returning to this old haunt. It was three years ago I spent my summer in that building. I knew the conference rooms, the floors, the halls, the cubes. I could have gone just about anywhere in the Heritage building with my eyes closed.

I had forgotten about the doorknobs, but it only took one careless moment to bring back a pain long forgotten about, but revealed in an instant as if it had never gone away. A timeless testimony to my lack of gracefulness; suffering by my own hand of ignorance and carelessness.

Just a very small reflection of fallen life in a fallen world.

The physical is not the only familiar pain we know in this world. In the last couple weeks, I have encountered pain in abundance – albeit at an arm’s length, seeing it ravage others’ lives. The pain of unexpected and irrevocable loss when a daughter loses her one and only father. The awful moment when death and decay escape the realm of the scientific and shake a person from the deep sleep of rhythm and routine. We may recognize the preciousness and fragility of life, we know we and our loved ones will all be taken away at some point, but nothing really prepares us, ever. Even after a long life or a long illness, something always something that seems wrong about death – and rightfully so. Though we tell ourselves it is the natural order of things (and it is, now), something in us cries out this is not how it was meant to be, and we are right.

Then there’s the pain of betrayal and deceit, when the closest of bonds are violated by calculated lies. Its one thing when we witness an honest mistake or misstep, but our throats involuntarily constrict at the notion of a plot conceived outside the loving care and knowledge of those closest to us. At least, that’s happened to me in every situation I’ve encountered, even in movies where that happens. Betrayal strikes at the very heart of trust, and faith is the very root of love and rest and all those things people need to be whole. That means, when even when one person hurts you, others start looking suspicious in short order. How do I know they’re telling the truth? When will it happen again? Frankly, when it happens enough, some even start wondering whether God Himself is trustworthy. Will He hurt me like everyone else has?

And then, the crushing pain of defeat, when a cause is declared lost after many years of fighting on its behalf. How much this feeling always sticks in my craw. I have always told myself (and others in my more prideful moments) that I specialize in proving people wrong. So I went to a college everyone said was a crazy, pie-in-the-sky idea, and I threw my all into it. And I don’t regret that. What I do regret is divisions in the body of Christ that led to the fulfillment of what “everyone” said would come to pass. I wanted it to win, and I know it could have – which in a sense makes the loss even greater. Why would this harebrained scheme come together just in time to fail?

There are a million pains and fears so familiar we’ve come to accept them as part of life. Of course he doesn’t think that about you, no one else has or ever will. You’ll never get on top of that project. What makes you think you could make LD someday? You are weak, you are inferior, on a good day you’re barely scraping by – and you fancy yourself an “overcomer?”

All these familiar pains are echoes of one another. Even when we hit a whole new wall, experience what may be to us a brand new pain, there is something familiar to it. In our sixth sense, there is a feel, a smell, a taste to it that we have known before. In our deepest, quietest moments, we meet the enemy, and it is ourselves. It is the fallenness of the human race, as the apostle put it, the world, the flesh, and the Devil – all rolled into one. There can be something so all-encompassing about the breadth and width and depth of it all that it can be suffocating. And you realize those days where it feels like everyone and everything is against you… well, perhaps it’s not paranoia after all. Maybe those are the days you are the most in tune with reality.

But that’s when it gets really good. I believe in a God who is bigger than all this pain and hurt in the world. That doesn’t mean He keeps us from it – but He has redeemed it. All the pain, hurt, and ugliness caused by our sin and the sins of others will take its toll. But as the Caedmon’s Call song says, it’s simply that strange feeling of Him working all for good. It’s hard to see in the middle of it, but even tears have the effect of clearing ones’ eyes. Idealism shattered is the first step toward reality’s revelation. Reality could be before us the whole time, but until we’re given eyes to see that can, we don’t have the good sense to look for it. I guess that’s part of the reason pain exists – pain is a grace used to draw our eternal eyes to the part of reality that can’t be seen. In that way, the stoicism some hail as spirituality actually keeps people further from understanding God as Redeemer. It’s only when we live to the hilt that we can begin to appreciate, on this side, how wide and long and deep God’s amazing love is for us.

Until this familiar pain is swallowed up in what will be, at that point (deo volente), an even more familiar grace.

My sin, O the bliss of this glorious thought
My sin, not in part, but the whole
Is nailed to the Cross and I bear it no more
Bless the Lord, bless the Lord, O my Soul!