This is a late night, woken suddenly, enraged by iniquities that I only seem fit to wrestle with at 3am, post. I do wonder, why does God use the times when we are nearly unconscious or covered in suds to bring about our greatest ideas? Those epiphanies that make us say Oh, wow, I really need to write that down later when I have more time/am not shampooing my hair! A notion which comes from the pit of hell because I have lost many a great joke to that way of thinking. Let's face it, we forget about it. Especially the "wake you up in the middle of the night" ones. Which, as I have already mentioned, is the backdrop for this post so I must apologize for any poor punctuation or auto-corrected words. And strange tangents too. Although, with my blog you should be used to a rabbit trail now and again, I am quite drowsy right now so the trails may be elaborate, but we will see.
I can't say that I am a fan of these moments. While feeling greatly inspired, I am also aware of the clock moving closer to the time when I must wake up. And every moment spent clicking on this tiny keyboard is another moment of sleep nonexistent. I love sleep, I could write a book of sonnets to the activity of sleeping. Sleeping is what keeps me going. Without it I would be dead. And so would you for that matter. Sleep well friends, sleep often and sleep in a nest of pillows if you can, it makes you feel like royalty. I can't explain why, I think it must be because no one ever really buys more than one or two pillows for one bed. This is a tragic mistake. Live like kings, invest in many pillows, my friends.
Like I said, I really love to sleep. So keep that in mind when you are reading this, I am sacrificing my most beloved hobby to write this. It is unfortunate too, because I know on top of not sleeping now, I will also be going about my day tomorrow with less sleep than is good for me (I am a full 8 hours girl as of late, and by "full 8 hours" I mean the minimum requirement for me to contribute to society the next day.) But, I am being made aware of the importance of sacrifice and endurance tonight as I struggle to give what is out of my control up to God.
Those moments when there is literally nothing you can do except let the rage churn inside of you while you try to make sense of it. It's horrible and makes you want to cry. You know you are helpless to change anything in the moment and so you have to sort of live with it. You can repress it or distract yourself, but that feeling isn't quick to go away. And in a way I am sort of glad for it, I think these moments are helpful in giving us a glimpse at how God must feel towards injustice. He, however, is not helpless to do anything about it, but he will wait to act on it according to his perfect timing. I read in Psalm 7, "God is a righteous judge, and a God who feels indignation every day." (V. 11) God feels this stuff, he feels it in far greater depth than we ever could. But still we must wrestle with it, and we should give it to him, but even when we give it to God, it's still there. It doesn't make the pain to away, but it reminds us that our God knows and feels it more powerfully than we do, and that he does have a plan for it. So these moments, while painful, really do help us.
It's sort of like growing pains. I remembered getting growing pains for the first time as a kid and asking my mom what the heck was happening to me and were my legs falling off. And if they weren't falling off, was there a way to cut them off because they hurt so much. And then mom would gently explain, in greatest sympathy, that they were growing pains, that I was growing taller. And then I shut right up, because I wanted to be taller. EVERYONE wanted to be taller.
It's funny, the minute I found out that these pains were helping me, I had this weird relationship with them. They hurt, but the hurting helped. It didn't quite make sense to me. It doesn't really compute in our brains that pain would be beneficial. We don't associate pain with good things. It never feels good. For us, the equation is simple: pain = not good, not good = bad, therefore it goes that pain is always bad. And this is how we have come to know and react to the pain we feel everyday. Headache? Tylenol. Cramps? Midol. Nausea? Pepto Bismol. Heartburn? Pepto Bismol. Indigestion?... Ok, Taylor, they get it. We have remedies to fix all of these. Now ladies, I'm not saying that when you have cramps that you don't Midol those suckers to death. And gents, when you have a headache because your lady has cramps, sometimes an aspirin is in order. More to my point, however, is that without all of these pains we would never know that anything was wrong. These pains are warning signs to us that tell us not to eat that again, or to slow it down a bit. Pain is good. It is not inherently bad. It is the warning system by which our bodies communicate to us that something isn't right. Pain doesn't feel good, but it is good that we can feel it.
The spiritual and emotional pain we feel is often treated like a physical ailment. First we try to shake it off, no big deal, it will go away eventually. But when it doesn't, we distract ourselves, just get out if the house go listen to others so you can't hear yourself think. And when we cannot remove the discomfort through a spiritual or emotional mean, I am sorry to say that it is all too common that we use poor physical remedies to numb the pain we feel. I don't want it to go unsaid that I do understand that there is a place for medical help for many different psychological and emotional problems. I am not a doctor, so you will have to forgive me for sounding insensitive, there is a lot I don't know about the subject. But I do see a lot of people using substances to get rid of their problems, when they are fully capable of dealing with them. I see many people running away from their problems. Running away from the pain and discomfort and that breaks my heart.
We need to learn to listen to the pain in our hearts. It is a preemptive to ripping off the band-aid and exposing the wound. It is facing the pain at the first sign and discovering the root of the problem, making sure we understand the cause and solution before we cover it up. Covering it up and leaving the wound alone only works properly if we know the wound is on the right track toward healing. And the pain that we feel from these kinds of wounds is good too. It says to you "you are hurt, seek medical attention" (except mine never sounds that rational in my head.) And once the wound is dressed, and the pain lingers faintly, it is saying "you are healing." Even getting better hurts.
We are awfully good about hiding the pain, covering it up, or finding a temporary solution to an eternal problem. When these spiritual pains come in the night and burden us with anger and fear we have to remember what that pain means. Ask questions of it, don't let it sit unattended, and don't try to cover it up. It is God making us more like him. We are feeling more like he does. We are learning to give him our burdens. Growing hurts. It's not fun. We can all say that we would love the benefits of growth without the process. But it is precisely by the process that we can benefit at all. In our lives, when we experience this kind of pain, we must stop and seek to know why it is there. Don't simply write it off or try to numb it by any means. Sit with it, ask God why it's there.
And while we wrestle with this pain, we ask God why we must deal with it, at 3am when we have church in the morning. And he gently and graciously explains to us that these are growing pains, and they are making us more like him. So shut up. And go back to sleep.
No comments:
Post a Comment