For the past few months, since around August, my body has brought new pain. There is nothing out of the ordinary about pain for me. Many of us experience it daily, routinely, constantly. It can show up as physical pain, a heavy heart, a restless mind, grief, loss, loneliness, overwhelm, diagnosis or a list of other undesirable forms. With time we begin to figure out ways to manage it, navigate through it, and find how to cope in it even when it does not go away. For those who carry long term pain, from the outside most would not even recognize that you are dealing with anything at all. The longer pain sticks around, the more familiar it becomes. We learn all of its curves and edges, and we create a map that helps us traverse its unlevel terrain, but new pain is different. New pain surprises us and jolts us. We finally become skilled at juggling what we have been handed, and suddenly an unexpected ball gets thrown into the pattern that brings chaos and confusion. New pain starts a new map, lost and uncertain of what is ahead, this suddenly becomes a strange and unfamiliar territory.

Yesterday this new pain hit beyond my body. After months of tests and troubleshooting, phone calls and reaching out, pushing through and pushing past, new tubes, new creams for this new pain, I felt defeated. Both heart and body searched for the way around this new map, and stared at what felt like a brand new road that I did not have the strength or energy to travel down.

I don’t write this for sympathy or for encouragement. I get buckets of support poured on my dry ground by more loving humans than I can begin to number, I am a rich girl. I certainly don’t write for pity. Pity is a dangerous drug, addictive in the moment because it holds up the wound for all to see, but in doing so, all focus and emphasis gets fixed on that place of pain. Instead of bringing relief, the pain becomes your entire center, and pain is much too fragile a foundation to hold the weight of a full, whole person.

I write because I have to. I write because years have brought people into my own life with their own blank maps, carrying them around to others, desperate for help to fill in the legends and lines that make the roads for a way out. We ache for a compass to point us in the right direction, and when there is no point, we wonder around aimlessly in our hurt.

Grief becomes hopeless when we feel that it is pointless.

What is the point? We have all said it, grasping for understanding in the middle of the hard and complicated things. Pain is not soft or pliable, we don’t control it or manipulate it. Less silly putty and more a shard of glass, pain is sharp, full of harsh corners, full of points. Sometimes the more we try to handle it, wrap our hands and our heads around it, the more wounded it leaves us.

Advent is a heavy, holy season. For those in pain, the contrast of celebration and grief can feel like a poorly paired duo. Last year I wrote about this same thing in a post titled Tidings of Discomfort and Joy.

So what are we to do with this jagged pain? Even when we cannot change it or fix it, we can allow our pain points to point us to something greater.

PAIN POINTS IN

No matter what shape it takes, pain has a way of doing something in us while it does something to us. The sharpness of pain can cut away at frivolity. It can dismember those shallow and surface things that usually hold our attention and affection. Meet anyone face to face who has allowed deep pain to do deep work, and you will find in them something untouchable. Long line at the grocery store, cut off in traffic, cold meal served from the waitress, angsty and trivial circumstances that most swat at and give energy and focus to can be seen as the gnats they are by the one who has done deep work. It does not mean that they never give in to anger or aggravation, but there is something inside the core of a person who has let pain work in them that sees and distinguishes what matters most. Often this will rise up and roll out in the form of gratitude. Our pastor recently referred to this as Thanksliving- moving through our lives in a way that we not only experience gratitude internally, but we let it motivate us to live thankful, generous, open handed lives in return. When we allow our pain points to work in us, we gain much more than we could ever lose.

PAIN POINTS OUT

Our tendency is to nurse our wounds in isolation. I believe and have experienced it to be true that solitude and silence are healthy, necessary ways for us to create some space to process pain and gain perspective, but healthy coping also involves community. Yesterday, for me, this community looked like a living room couch where my snot and tears ran free in front of my people. As I hung up from a phone call that shook me and etch-a-sketched what little was left on my map, I couldn’t hold back the emotion. I am an expert at being on. Most don’t know I am struggling because I don’t allow the struggle any real estate on my smiling face. But this day on this couch with this group, I curled up and sobbed. Again, no pity, just a behind the scenes reality that you have a fellow friend in this fight who is all too familiar with pain. When we allow our pain to point out, we are given the gift of helping others who are hurting, and if we can be vulnerable enough, letting others in to help us too. There is no fixing here.

There is no fixing here. There is no fixing here. There is no fixing here.

If I didn’t think it would be overkill, I would type it a hundred more times. This does not mean that there is no place for appropriate solutions and options from those around us that bring help and healing, rather an acknowledgement that in the moment of grief, answers may not be the primary response we are needing. We often hesitate to enter into someone else’s pain because we lack answers, we lack what to say, and we carry heaviness of our own. After years of work in a faith community with real people who have real hurts and messes, I have learned the gift of presence. Someone with us. Simple, beautiful, and highly underrated. Ask anyone who has lost a loved one, and most can list by name the faces present behind them at the funeral home. Each face is attached to a set of hands that somehow help carry a piece of the grief, lifting some of the burden off of the shoulders of the one. The day the diagnosis came, the first night back at home without them, the waiting in the ER in silence is wounding and awful and just bearable by the sheer grace that we are not in this alone. Pain points us out of ourselves, past our own minds that try to trap us and trick us into believing we are the only one.

PAIN POINTS UP

Pain and discomfort are a gauge on the dashboard of our life. They point to an ought, a standard, a belief in the way things should be. Physical pain declares that my body should function better than this. Loneliness says that I ought not to be alone or separated from those I love.

I should be married by now. Things ought to be different. I shouldn’t be this tired, this overworked, this hurt or sad or empty. I thought that it would be better than this.

In her book “It’s Not Supposed To Be This Way,” Lysa Terkeurst explains:

Genesis tells us that the human heart was created in the perfection of the garden of Eden. He said it was all good. Very good. Everything ebbed and flowed in complete harmony. There was nothing that didn’t look right or feel right. There was no disease or divorce or depression or death. The human heart was created in the context of perfection. But we don’t live there now. This is why our instincts keep firing off the lie that perfection is possible. We have pictures of perfection etched into the very DNA of our souls.

There is a repeating cadence of “it was good” pulsing in the air around us and throbbing deep in our hearts. There is a should, and we know it, and we will hunger for it until we are reunited with it.

This final place that pain points, my final hope and the reason I cannot get past or get over Jesus. Just as the presence of those we love is lived out in our pain as a healing balm, Christmas is a flesh and bones example that there is no pain we will ever have to experience alone. The Hebrew scripture spoke of Immanuel to come. It means “God with us.”

With us in our hurt. With us in our disappointment, With us as the compass to keep pointing our gaze up to the better things we seek. Advent means to wait for the arrival of, and many of us finding ourselves right now in this second so desperately waiting for relief. Christmas is the gift that reminds us that we do not wait alone, and we do not wait in vain.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer-

Advent makes people whole: new people. Stand up, look up, your view is too much down towards the earth, fixed upon the superficial changes and happenings. Look up, you who have turned away disappointed from heaven. Look up, you whose eyes are heavy with tears and who mourn that the earth has snatched everything from you. Look up, you who are so heavy laden with guilt that you feel you cannot look up. Be patient. Wait for a little while longer. Wait and something quite new will come over you.
God will come.