He Is Not Safe..... (pt2)

I have discovered over the past few years that journeying with God is never boring and sometimes painful. We tend to have this idea that God never causes us pain but I know this is not true. He most definitely brings pain into our lives but it is not without purpose and beauty of it's own.

I remember asking my mom when I was about four or five why God made pain. I wondered why things hurt. The way she explained it me has forever becoming cemented in my memory. She asked me to imagine walking barefoot on a sandy beach. In the sand there are shards of glass. As you walk your feet are being continually cut open by the glass. If we did not feel pain, we would have no idea that we are being cut and could end up bleeding to death. Because of pain, we know that something is wrong. I love what C.S. Lewis has to say about pain in his book The Problem of Pain. He says, "We can ignore even pleasure. But pain insists upon being attended to. 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."

I have found in my own life that God uses pain to let me know when something is wrong and needs to be put  right. I have also found that there is pain in the putting right. When I was around seven I broke my little finger. It hurt horribly. It was splinted and left to heal. It never did heal right. It is smaller than my other and refuses to straighten. If I were to have it fixed it would require the doctor re-breaking my finger and splinting it again. The re-breaking would hurt much worse than the initial break but it is the only way it would ever heal right and straighten out. 

There are many times when God must go in and re-break places that were once broken and did not heal correctly. Places that healed crooked and deformed. God desires us to be whole and many times the only way to bring wholeness is to re-break and re-set those places. And just as physical re-breaking tends to be more painful than the initial, so can spiritual and emotional re-breaking. 

The past three years have been marked by re-breaking in my life. They have been some of the most painful years of my life. But I know that the pain He brings is for my good. It is so that I can be healed and whole.