Pain

By Pastor Paul Gauche

Today’s Word: ‘Pain’ as in… entering our own pain allows us to enter into other’s pain.

The next time you’re playing Trivial Pursuit and you get the question, “What’s the shortest verse in the bible?” You’ll know the answer, right? In most English versions it’s “Jesus wept.”

But the fact that Jesus wept is certainly anything but trivial. There’s far more going on here than simply a rabbi weeping over the death of a dear friend.

This is a profound insight into what it means to be honest about pain and suffering, about brokenness and what it takes to walk deeply into any or all of those things. The story that gives us this poignant look into the heartache which drove Jesus to tears, and probably to his knees, was the death of his friend Lazarus.

You might want to hit pause on this and red that story in John 11.

What does it mean to be a community of faith that weeps? As long as most of the human race is dealing with at least one heartache every day, we might want to gain some insight here.

Let’s begin here: To be a community that’s able to weep with others, we need to be able to weep ourselves. If I’m not able to be in touch with, or express my own grief, I’m probably not going to be of any help to you. I can’t enter into the honesty of the brokenness of in your life if I’m not honest with my own brokenness.

And in the midst of all the things that break our hearts and cause us to weep, we say the darndest things, don’t we? Perhaps in the midst of someone’s grief, you’ve heard someone use statements like these:

“Well, they’re better off now…”

“They’re in a better place …”

“Don’t worry, they’re not in pain any more…”

“There are brighter days ahead…”

“God needed another ‘fisherman, grandparent, or baseball fan in heaven!”

Really? Does God look around and think, “You know, we could sure use someone who loves dogs ‘up here’ because all dogs go to heaven!” If God could create the Grand Canyon, then certainly God is more creative than that.

The truth is, we say these things because we’re uncomfortable with weeping and grief. We’re more uncomfortable with not knowing what to say, do or even how to feel.

How about you? What keeps you from walking deeply into another’s pain? Why is grief difficult to share?

#100days50words

Paul Gauche is the Pastor of Life Transitions at Prince of Peace. His posts are part of his #100days50works project, where be blogs about a different word each day. You can follow his project on Instagram (@pgauche), or on his blog, Thriving Rhythms.