Editor's note: If you're in pain, you're not alone. Enjoy today's devotion from Fearfully and Wonderfully Broken by Sydney Anne Bennett.
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Only my fingers moved, jerking involuntarily at times, tight and stiff, a little too warm, tiny splinters of pain reminding me that even writing is physical work. Were I an old man before the rain, I might’ve given out a contented moan, rubbed my knees, stretched my shoulders, and grunted something like, “Oh, my bones weren’t made to live this long.”
But I was not an old man. I was twenty-two, and it was two in the morning, the hour of the sad, the lonely, the insomniac. Maybe you know this hour too. Maybe you’ve also lain awake watching the ceiling in the dark, wondering how the next day will ask more of you than you have to give. Maybe your pain isn’t physical — grief or fear, regret or depression, a mind or heart that is weary of struggling.
I don’t want to waste my pain
— that sentence stings a little even to write. It might sound like I’m saying pain is good, or that we should grin and bear it. It might sound like I’m saying every agony has a seen purpose — silver linings to dreaded clouds, which you will only see if you dare to look hard enough.
No.
Pain is awful. It was never meant to exist in God’s good world. It is so awful, the Son of God came to this earth in broken human flesh and gave His life to defeat it.
Yet, since pain is here right now, and we with it, I don’t want it to be for nothing. I don’t want it to hook me from the inside out and turn me into a numb, bitter, hollow-eyed navel-gazer, entombed in despair. I want it — somehow — to be gathered up by God and reshaped into redemption. I know He will do it. He promises. But at two in the morning, it is too easy — too easy to become jaded and consumed by discouragement, by the permanency of struggle, by the stretching forth of future years that might bring no change, or bring change for the worse.
Insomnia has long been my bosom enemy. Anxiety introduced us. Depression drew us closer. Maybe you know her too; she’s visited you — stretched herself out beside you in the dark, unwelcome but familiar, sharing your mattress. Many nights, she brings her friends Nightmares and Flashbacks along for kicks and giggles, for when things get boring and she can see us drifting a bit. “None of that,” she says, rising dark and phantomlike above our heads. “Have a shot of terror.” I imagine her cracking her knuckles, but they never make a sound.
I thought Insomnia had left me for a while, moved away, or finally decided to get a life. Then I met Pain accidentally. I don’t remember how we met, but Insomnia was with her. They’re with me now, side by side, an unsplittable duo.
The kindhearted and innocent say I should dump this toxic group.
“Take a deep breath. It’s because you’re too anxious all the time!”
“I know someone who healed herself by going on keto.”
“Don’t speak that over yourself.”
“Stay positive. I know you’ll get better!”
People say those kinds of things enough times, and eventually you’ll just smile. Those people mean well. But you survived the hazing, and they don’t know what you’re in for.
But I have another enemy, one I often forget because she lies in the shadows. Apathy is here too. Cloaked in subtlety, in quietude, in one plodding moment followed by the next. Pain gave her the key to enter. Pain is the excuse to let her reign. She is the mistress that promises in reverse: Instead of promising to give much, she promises to only take a little — and then takes all in the end.
When I say I don’t want to waste my pain, I mean I don’t want to surrender to Apathy. She is a thief, creeping in through the window when the suffering lingers too long, when the answers don’t come, when the weight of it all presses down so heavily I wonder if I should stop fighting. Apathy is not rest; she is a surrender to meaninglessness. And that is the last thing pain should be. In the fight against her, there is a real, practical demand for physical tasks and labor. For getting up and accomplishing what you can with your moments and energy. For blessing others in the ways you are able. But there are days, perhaps years, perhaps a lifetime, from which illness can rob this physical ability. It is far easier now for Apathy to win — when you fall into the trap of thinking the value and meaning of your suffering is found only in what you accomplish and produce through it — or in overcoming it. Apathy crouches at the nightstand beside your bed and whispers: “Your suffering is meaningless.”
When it’s dark, and there’s no other distraction, it is easy to listen.
But it is a lie.
Apathy tells you your suffering is meaningless. But God wastes nothing. Even pain.
This fight, this race, this devotion to not wasting your pain does not come from physical exertion, or accomplishments, or money, or the number of lives you have changed. It isn’t a fight to hold on to your strength, or energy, or pre-illness capacity and stamina. Those things will slip through your hands like water no matter how tightly you try to hold them. This fight — this fight to not waste your pain — is a fight against unbelief. A fight to trust that God has not abandoned you here. A fight to rest when every struggling, screaming, self-sabotaging instinct inside you says, “Do something. Fix it. Prove yourself. Earn your way out.”
Some people are called to pain the way others are called to abundance. Or maybe we all, like Job, are called to both. Risk of loss is the price of blessing. One has never existed without the other, even in Eden.
The race is won by collapsing into His mercy. Even the most broken sinner may do that. Only the most broken sinner can.
Excerpted with permission from Fearfully and Wonderfully Broken by Sydney Anne Bennett, copyright Sydney Bennett.
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Your Turn
Are you in a season of pain — physical, mental, or spiritual? Hang on… God will reshape it into redemption. At two in the morning, when you can’t sleep, be reminded of this: you can collapse into God’s mercy and He will hold you tight. ~ Devotionals Daily