When Pain Is Trying to Tell You Something

Nobody likes pain. We avoid it, medicate it, pray for it to go away, and do almost anything we can to make it stop. And yet, as terrible as pain can be, our lives would actually be much worse without it.

Think about people who have lost the ability to feel pain. One of the dangers associated with diseases such as leprosy is nerve damage that can diminish the ability to feel an injury. A person can cut themselves, burn themselves, or develop a wound without realizing how serious it has become. The absence of pain doesn't mean everything is okay. Sometimes it means the warning system isn't working.

I learned a much less dramatic version of that lesson one day while helping with the feeding program at our church. We were busy carrying boxes of food out to cars, moving quickly and trying to take care of everyone. Somewhere along the way, I caught my arm on one of the boxes and cut myself. But between the adrenaline and everything going on around me, I didn't really notice it.

Until somebody looked at me and said, "You're bleeding everywhere."

Sure enough, I was.

Had the cut hurt when it happened, I would have stopped. I would have looked at it, cleaned it up, found a bandage, and taken care of the problem. Instead, because I didn't feel it, I just kept going. By the time somebody pointed it out, I had blood on myself and had made a much bigger mess than necessary.

I've wondered how often we do the same thing with the other wounds in our lives.

We get hurt, but we keep moving. We stay busy. We go to work. We take care of everybody else. We fulfill our responsibilities. Sometimes we even convince ourselves that we're fine. But somewhere beneath all that activity, we're bleeding.

Pain is often the thing that finally gets us to pay attention to what we've been trying to ignore.

Think about something as ordinary as a toothache. I know people who will avoid the dentist as long as humanly possible. They know they probably ought to go. They know something isn't right. But as long as they can tolerate it, they keep putting it off. Then one night the pain becomes unbearable, and suddenly they're willing to call the dentist first thing in the morning.

What changed?

The pain finally became greater than their desire to avoid dealing with the problem.

That's what pain does. If you accidentally step into an ant bed, you don't stand there and have a philosophical discussion about why ants exist. You move! The sting tells you something is wrong, and the pain motivates you to do something before even more damage is done.

I wish emotional and spiritual pain were always that simple.

There have been seasons in my life when I would have given almost anything to make the pain stop. I've asked God why. I've wondered what He was doing. I've wished circumstances were different. And yet, looking back over my life, I have learned far more in the painful seasons than I ever learned when everything was going well.

I love those seasons when the wind is in the sails, the sun is shining, and the ship seems to be moving effortlessly in the right direction. I'd choose those days every time if I could.

But those haven't always been the days that changed me.

Pain has forced me to ask questions I wouldn't have asked otherwise. It has made me examine things I would have ignored. It has caused me to pray differently, think differently, and sometimes make changes I had resisted making. Pain has exposed wounds that needed healing and places in my life where something needed to change.

Which brings us to one of the hardest questions people of faith wrestle with:

Why does God allow pain?

I don't have a neat answer that makes every painful experience understandable. I don't think we're supposed to pretend that every tragedy comes wrapped in an obvious lesson. Some things hurt because we live in a broken world. Sometimes other people hurt us. Sometimes we make decisions that have painful consequences. Sometimes things happen that we simply cannot explain.

But I have become convinced of this:

God doesn't have to cause our pain in order to use it.

Maybe that's an important distinction.

The thing that hurt you may not have been God's plan. The rejection, disappointment, betrayal, loss, failure, or heartbreak may not have been something He sent into your life to teach you a lesson. But that doesn't mean He is absent from it.

God has a remarkable way of meeting us in the places that hurt.

And sometimes He uses the pain to get our attention.

Maybe you are hurting right now. And if you are, I'm guessing your first prayer has probably been the same prayer most of us would pray:

"God, please make this stop."

There's nothing wrong with that prayer. When something hurts, of course we want relief.

But maybe there is another prayer worth praying alongside it:

"God, what do You want me to see here?"

Is there something that needs healing? Something you've been ignoring? A boundary that needs to be established? A relationship that needs attention? Something you need to release? Somewhere you've been afraid to move? Is the pain revealing something that you couldn't—or wouldn't—see when everything felt comfortable?

Don't waste the pain.

That doesn't mean celebrating it. It doesn't mean pretending it doesn't hurt. And it certainly doesn't mean calling something good that was genuinely terrible.

It means believing that pain doesn't get the final word.

This is one of the ideas I explore more deeply in The Courage to Move Forward. Pain has a way of convincing us that our story has stopped at the place where we were hurt. But it hasn't. God can meet us there, and sometimes the very place where we thought our story ended becomes the place where we begin moving forward again.

Maybe today you don't need to understand everything that has happened to you. Maybe you don't even need all the answers yet.

Maybe you just need to notice where it hurts.

Pay attention to it. Bring it honestly to God. Get help when you need it. Let people who love you walk with you. And ask God whether the pain you've been trying so desperately to escape might be pointing toward something that needs your attention.

Because sometimes pain is not telling you that your life is over.

Sometimes it's telling you that it's time to move.

And if you know someone who might need this today, send them this post. You never know when a simple word of encouragement might be exactly what someone needs to keep moving forward.