Seasons of Pain.

“We can ignore even pleasure. But pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.” 

― C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

Pain.

I've been thinking a lot about my pain lately. In recent weeks, I'm beginning to accept that the pain I have walked through these past few years has changed me. The losses of relationships, both romantic and familial, both from death and from choice, have marked me deeply. Sometimes, the wounds still hemorrhage, leaving dull , deep aches in their wake. 

I admit that I have medicated my pain. I have tried to ignore it. I have lived my life as though nothing happened, as though everything was fine. The only thing that got me is depression and anxiety. I've learned in this journey, pain cannot be ignored. We can try to ignore it, but we will fail.

That's the thing with pain - it's a dynamic force that snaps us to attention, even as we crumble to a heap on the floor from it all.

And, if we let Him, God uses this pain as a tool. He takes the things that were meant for evil and uses them for good. He takes the side effects from living in a broken world (broken relationships, death, and a plethora of other things) and brings redemption. I'm finding, though, that this redemption does not always look the way I want it to or the way I think it should.

The truth is, I've been afraid of the changes that have come from my pain, afraid to acknowledge that I am not the person I was two years ago when all of it began. Over the past few weeks, though, with the help of my counselor, I've started questioning my fear.

"Is it a bad thing that the pain has changed you, Miranda?", he asked.

Ah, my knee jerk reaction is yes. Because I'm scared. Because this is new, different, foreign. I am quicker to be silent where perhaps, once, I would speak. I am slower to go back to the familial relationships that broke me, drawing a line where there once was none. 

I am able to better sit in the pain of others because of walking the deep waters of my own pain.

Is it a bad thing?

No.

I'm just scratching the surface of this, just beginning to form my thoughts into some words. This past season was on purpose. And this current place is on purpose.

I don't have much family that I keep in touch with. I am in a season of being alone here in this great big world. (I'm using the term alone in the sense of biological family - parents, grandparents, etc. not in reference to community - I have a stellar community that I am so grateful for.)

The second question that has started coming up is - what if Jesus wants me here, "alone", to be just with Him for this season?  He does that all the time in the Scriptures, inviting the disciples to come away with Him and rest. I can't even dream of the redemption that could come out of that, if I would only come.

This place is strategic. Richard Foster writes in Celebration of Discipline, "Jesus calls us from loneliness to solitude."

There is something to this. In the solitude, we are postured to hear Jesus. We are postured for the silence to come and do the heavy lifting that we try so hard to avoid. We are postured to find that the answer to these painful longings are ultimately found in the One who is familiar with suffering and who has caught all of our tears.

And, this....this is where the deeper work of healing begins.