pain

I don't like pain!  I'm a big fan of epidurals and aspirin.  I like the little bandaids.  I closed my eyes and turned my head while I got my shot yesterday.  And rubbed my poor arm all afternoon.   I feel nauseous just remembering it.

And here I am.  Smack dab in the middle of pain central.  Someone up there has a sense of humor.  In room 1 it is stitches.  (no, I don't want to see your sliced arm! Keep the bandage on.)  In room 2 we have a broken hip.  In room 3 yet another motorcycle wreck.  In room 4....I could go on all night.

I wish I had a magic wand.  To make everything happy, clean and all better.  I want to erase the pain.

In our Pastoral Care class we talked about the rich experience that can be found in pain.  I had to be convinced.  But these sentences helped me look at pain from a new perspective.

People become most aware of their values when they reach turning points in their lives and must make choices or when they are thrust into decision making because of a crisis.

Pastoral caregivers can...ask questions like these: Do their religious faith and practices give people new life, or exacerbate already painful circumstances? To what extent do people experience the fullness and complexity of God's presence with them?

In the midst of loss, violence and struggles, they may find the God he or she has known all along: the immanent presence, like the oxygen in the air that sustains life. Or they may see God in wholly new ways, as though scales have fallen from his or her eyes; it will be as if the transcendent God, full of mystery, is glimpsed, as Job saw God in the whirlwind.

Pastoral Care: A Postmodern Approach page 113, 114