“The way we interpret and respond to pain throws us into a gear that propels us forward or backward. While pain itself is indifferent, it never has an indifferent effect. Pain will shift you one way or the other. We all have a default mode of dealing with pain: fight, flight, or freeze. It’s the way we’ve dealt with conflicts, threats, fears, and loss all our lives, but our default mode may not be a productive healthy way to handle pain any longer. Now it’s time to change. Change only happens when our level of desire (or actually desperation) rises above the level of our fears. Pain is a watershed: it can cause us to shrink back into a hole and hope it goes away, or it can galvanize new hope, new plans, and new passions to learn the lessons it can teach us”~ Leadership Pain
Pain has pierced us with conflicts, fractured relationships, grief, disappointments, betrayal and illness. We have also experienced the pain of disclosed blind spots in our own hearts that led to poor choices. New experiences can bring new pain, yet when we embrace God through pain, we are changed into His likeness.
Revelation and wisdom have poured into my heart with each experience of pain. I have meshed with the Lord in a deeper way through pain. I have experienced Him powerfully in my weakness, by refusing to hide in fear and choosing to connect HONESTLY with His people. I have found my personal pain to be “grace disguised”. So now when pain presents itself, I am expecting God’s grace to show up as well.
His sufficient grace never fails. His perfect love is continually casting out fear. He prepares us for eternity.
Take a step toward your pain/tension this week, dip into His word and seize the grace available to you.
What are you learning?
How can I connect in prayer with you this week?
“Therefore we do not become discouraged [spiritless, disappointed, or afraid]. Though our outer self is [progressively] wasting away, yet our inner self is being [progressively] renewed day by day. For our momentary, light distress [this passing trouble] is producing for us an eternal weight of glory [a fullness] beyond all measure [surpassing all comparisons, a transcendent splendor and an endless blessedness]! So we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are unseen; for the things which are visible are temporal [just brief and fleeting], but the things which are invisible are everlasting and imperishable.”
2 Corinthians 4:16-18 AMP
“Strengthening the souls of the disciples, encouraging them to continue in the faith, and saying that through many tribulations we must enter the kingdom of God.”
Acts 14:22 ESV
“By your endurance you will gain your souls.”
Luke 21:19 NRSV
Thank you Kim! I truly believe that pain can be our friend. Shalom