Day 3102 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Lamentations 3:39 NIV

Having settled into such a fierce aversion to pain and misery we've sadly lost sight of the fact that to feel pain demands life.

Yet around here anymore it seems that for the most part most of us would just as soon pass away than endure one more day filled with anything grievous or grating or in other way less than self-gratifying. Maybe part of it is that we're so self-absorbed that we can only appreciate that which pleases and appeases our self-perfected selfishness. Or, and so equally likely that I venture to surmise that the reason is a combination of both the above and the following:

We're just in love with this mindset that's set upon our remaining conveniently oblivious to the obvious.

Indeed we’ve adopted this really weird outlook of life that’s left us immune to understanding. All we can see though pain is the hurt. We just know it hurts and that what hurts feels bad and if it feels bad then it can’t be good. Right? We don’t deserve to hurt. Right? God owes us endless comfort and overwhelming joy so deep that we drown in happiness. Right? This is all about us and what we want and what we feel we are entitled to. Right?

If God is good then He would only do unto us what we believe to be good. Right?

And since pain hurts and all that hurts is bad and because life hurts then life is bad and therefore He who made this life and controls this life must be bad too. Right? Slippery slope ain’t it? That’s what happens when weakness meets entitlement and arrogance: We become a people unable to see any purpose in anything other than that which leaves us comfortable and at peace.

The obvious is that there's no denying that life is heavy but that we only add to the crushing weight with all the mistakes and wrong steps we take. We race through life so fast and with so little care or responsibility or awareness of our responsibility to care that we don't care about much of anything anymore. That is other than whatever pleases us.

But having chosen to become a people that seek out only all that pleases and satisfies and satiates, we've unwittingly lost half of our lives, our opportunities, our outlooks, ourselves even. We've chosen to focus only on the half of life that makes us feel good because we think that feeling good is all that matters as what feels good seems to our lowered standards all that makes life special.

There's nothing special about pain is there? Nothing to be gained in what our comfort contends is but a loss of comfort. We stand no victory in anything that seems a loss of any amount of time that could have, and in our opinion should have, been spent having fun and being happy and enjoying the life we want to have that's based on all that we want to have in life.

Indeed, up here on the surface where our preferences reside, nope, nothing of any purpose in every pain.

But to have lost sight of the promise that there's a purpose is to invite yet one more reason into our arsenal of others seeking to inspire forfeit. We want so deeply to give up whenever life gets hard. We adore this idea that we can run away, run and hide, lurk in the shadows just below the radar of the big bad things unbecoming of what we're trying to make our lives become.

If it even pretends like it might hurt or question or confront or offend then we balk and ball and squall and throw a fit as it simply doesn't fit in our plans for our lives that again bring only our gain. No pain, but not because we're willing to rise above it in some Rocky Balboa sense, but no pain because it's just not welcome. Won't have it. Not up in here!

But again, to feel pain demands we be living. And while that's obvious as you must be able to walk in order to stub your toe and you can't scrape your knee falling off your bike if you're not alive enough to ride a bike and, like me in a few days ago, you've gotta be able to bend down in order to stand back up and bloody your head on the corner of a cabinet door.

And it's not even physical pain that we're well aware of and entirely disinterested in. You have to have a heart to feel heartbreak, need to have a sense of morality to endure feeling guilty, and there's the whole hassle of hindsight which reminds of regrets that are only possible through the ability to remember.

Indeed, this verse and the pain we feel in regard to faith and the more spiritual side of life felt through things like guilt, regret, shame, they are miserable. They hurt, hurt in a way that a scrape doesn't really come close to comparing to. No, pain inside hurts worse than that which only renders infirm our flesh and bone.

But why does God allow for all these miseries and torments? Why the need to hurt and endure the hassle of having to heal? Why can't we just get through this life with as little loss and illness as possible? How come the pain when it only fights against the perfection we so deeply and desperately desire?

I wager that all of us have considered and contemplated questions such as those a great many times in our lives. But how about we flip it, turn it around a little and consider a different angle of the same perplexities.

Why are we still alive? Why hasn't God washed His hands and just walked away? Why this time to heal from the pains we feel? How come He sees fit to have shown such restraint when He's the unchanging God who has been known to send floods and famine?

Feels a little different from that angle doesn't it?

You see, if our faith is based, as it's called to be, upon the Word of God then we know at least a little of who God is and how He works. And we also know that He doesn't change, that He is the same yesterday and today and will be the same still tomorrow. We know, or at least we ought to know if we know anything of Scripture and the Gospel and the cross and He who hung upon it, that we've lived in sin against His kindness.

And so, where then are we finding this line that we'd like He who bore our cross not to cross? Where is this sense of entitlement coming from that's left us with the assumption that His love owes us comfort and contentment and other such concession? How did we get here to this place in which we shake our fists at the very same God that we pray to for the blessings we want Him to send our way?

Seems a bit brash does it not? A little spoiled? A lot spoiled?

My point is that the pains we feel, be them physical or mental or even spiritual, are not proof of God being either inattentive or nonexistent. No, though we've been taught, easily enough ironically, to assume as such, no, life's many pains are present to remind us that we are indeed alive. Because none of it would matter all that much anymore if we weren't.

Couldn't have our hearts broken if they'd already stopped beating. Our flesh couldn't bruise nor bleed had it already returned to the dust from which it came. Even our souls wouldn't bug us with those pesky consciences if we'd moved on toward wherever our eternal residence happened to be prepared.

But the fact that we do get our hearts broken by the pains of betrayal and blaspheme prove that we're alive enough to care enough to keep trying to fight for something better than what we've become. The fact that we can feel it whenever we stub our toe or hit our heads offers us the ability to learn and grow into a person who either pays more attention or simply buys a helmet.

And that we wrestle with shame shows us that He's working in us, something that would be already finished if our lives were equally over.

So yes, why do we complain when we're punished if we only feel the pain of punishment because we're still alive enough to know it hurts? Don't know but as I sit here I contend that pain and suffering and the misery of being reminded of our many mistakes is undeniably one of the greatest blessings we're continually given.

Because He allows it in the middle of life with time still left to learn the lessons we can only learn from hurting.

The fact of the matter is that God could have, and rightfully and justifiably so, ended us all long ago. We've done so many things against Him that He ought to be entirely, endlessly, eternally against us at this point. But that He's not as shown in the fact that His patience still offers us the opportunity to learn and grow and find the humility needed to do both just proves how very good He has always been.

He gives us the chance to change, and even if it takes pain to finally encourage us to do so, we should be thankful for the opportunity to do so. We should be thankful for the pains we feel as they both remind us that we're alive and inspire us to live in a better way so as to feel said pain less often. We should be thankful that His will is both higher and therefore better than ours.

Because ours would have had us settling into the nothing we've always known rather than striving for the growth that we think hurts too much to be worth the risk.

Friends, pain may indeed feel as if we're being punished, but I fear it does only because we've forgotten the necessity of tough love. We don't need to be coddled as we've already done that for and to ourselves plenty over the years. No, we need to be pushed, to be hurt, to be chastised and compromised because we need to be able to see what's holding us back before it forever holds us hostage.

In fact, I’d say it’s fair to say that we do need the punishment of pain, but only because it’s there to help us learn to make the changes found through repentance that will prevent a kind of punishment too painful to describe as painful. Yes, what awaits at the end of the way of life we’ve learned to love is the entire opposite of the comfort we’ve chosen to cherish.

We don't have to like the pain of life but we shouldn't hate it so much that we violently reject it. No, maybe we should be a little more open to being open-minded, you know, considering our minds have been so clearly compromised by compromise. Maybe we should learn to lighten up on our preferences just a little, or a lot. Maybe we should try and see a little further beyond the boundaries we've set up to keep us feeling safe.

Because, well, maybe just beyond our preferences for the comfort we enjoy lies the chance to feel God working through the fire. But that's something we can't ever know or see or understand if we're never held to the flames.

Either way, He is always working for the good of those who love Him. Perhaps we just need to learn to love Him enough to trust that the pains we feel have a purpose that's concerned about something deeper than our preferences.

Maybe we need to learn to love Him enough to not hate Him when He gives us what we don't deserve in order to steer us away from what we do.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold