Pain

 I am an incredibly blessed and fortunate person in that in all my 55 years on this planet I've never really suffered from any significant illness or injury.  I've only ever bee in hospital once for a minor procedure and can count on the fingers of one hand the times I've been ill ( glandular fever and chickenpox twice as a teenager)  Apart from one episode of about four months when I had chronic back pain I can say that I really don't know what it is like to live with a medical condition or ongoing pain or discomfort.  But yesterday I was in pain.  I've either done something to my foot or I've got plantar fasciitis .  After 4 Jo Jingles classes on Tuesday I came home barely able to put my foot to the floor and it got worse overnight.  Yesterday I limped through two classes and came home to spend the rest of the day with my foot on ice and the crutches to hand.  Im writing this lying in bed with my foot in a tubigrip bandage all dose up with painkillers in the hope that I might get at least some sleep.   Poor me.  Poor poor me 😁


When this pain started ( and to be honest its been sort of niggling in the background on and off for a wee while) I had a thought.  And the thought was that pain is a liar.  It has a loud voice and it shouts louder than anything else.  Which makes us pay attention to it and that makes it worse.   Now I know this is neither medically or necessarily spiritually true, but its just the thought that came to me.  I had a notion that I could choose to reject the pain and not listen to it and that my brain would stop registering the pain signals.  I tried it and it did seem to sort of work for a while but then I did 4 classes of jumping up and down with 3 year olds and that did for me!!   

Pain must be a result of the fall.  We are told that in heaven there will be no more pain so presumably its not something that God wants for us.  But interestingly there will be scars in heaven as Jesus still has his.  We know that pain here on earth serves a purpose - it tells us when there is something going wrong that we need to pay attention to.  There are some people on the planet who have no ability to feel pain in their bodies and they are at constant risk of injury as they can't feel if they have trodden on something sharp or put their hands on something hot.    So there's this dilemma for us as Christians.  I think that sometimes we need to feel pain and we might actually benefit from feeling it.  But at the same time pain can become such a focus and a dominant element in our lives that it blocks out our abilities both to hear God and to serve Him.  Pain is a weapon in the enemies arsenal which God will use for His purposes from time to time.  And pain has ultimately been banished from heaven because it was defeated on the cross.

I remember reading John Wimber's book way way way back in the day and being utterly enthralled by the idea of praying for healing.  Ever since, I have prayed for people's pain to cease and for conditions to be healed.  And sometimes I have seen pretty instant answers to those prayers.  But not often. There is so much to learn - mostly about listening.  Discerning what someone's pain is about, why it is there, what God wants to do about it.....  sigh. I want to see miracles but I'm pretty sure I don't have either the faith or the holiness.   


So I'm off to pray for my foot.  Im going to tell the pain that it is a liar and that if it doesn't come directly from the hand of God then its not mine and Im evicting it.  I'm going to ask God to be kind and to strengthen my heel and ankle and all the mechanics of my foot and I'm going to thank Him that for the past 55 years my feet have worked perfectly and I've never once had to think about them.  We all take our health so much for granted until something goes wrong.  Then I'm going to pray for friends of mine who live with constant pain and discomfort but who don't complain.  And finally I shall strengthen my resolve to lose at least 2 stone in weight - because I suspect that the pain in my foot is really all about me being too fat for my size 7s to cope with.  😞

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