Chronic Pain in a Fast Paced World

I really struggled with whether or not I would write about this – because let’s be honest, as soon as we read about someone else’s suffering we often give it a “rating” on whether or not it is bad enough to be real for that person. We often read about someone with a terminal illness and then think that someone else’s depression, migraines, broken leg etc aren’t bad enough to “complain” about.

At least that’s how I used to think. I used to always compare my suffering. For instance, when I struggled with eating disorders it felt so silly for it to be a real problem and source of pain in my life because I was an otherwise healthy girl who was causing this problem to herself.

But now I believe that we should never compare suffering. We will always experience different degrees of suffering at different points in our life, and often these will not add up to the timelines of our friends’ suffering. We shouldn’t compare suffering. We should walk straight into others’ suffering with empathy and listening ears.

For the past 22 months, I have been struggling with jaw, neck, head and facial pain and thus of course chronic headaches. (Don’t worry – I know the cause and it is muscle related). For the past 22 months I wake up expecting to feel limited. I wake up knowing I will be in pain today and I will have to cope. I wake up knowing that I have to be tougher than it is. And sometimes, I wake up feeling totally defeated and so tired of this and I just cry and my husband is left to deny himself and pick up the pieces.

Somedays the pain is better, and I am so thankful for those days or simple hours. Sometimes the pain is excruciating and I just go lie in bed alone and try not to get completely caught up in hopelessness. My jaw pain / headaches are made much worse by talking, and so the past 22 months have been lonely months. Not to mention, in those months I also moved to a completely new city and so left all comfort of family and friends behind. These months have been spent mostly in silence (besides work).

This pain makes it so hard to do my job, a job that I love. I am a prek teacher and it is all talking. And when you aren’t teaching, people want to make small talk or just be nice and be your friend. But all of it causes me physical pain. I put on a happy face and push through it every day, but then go home and every night have to deal with the aftermath of it all. And then I wake up and do it all over again.

I hate this pain.

This pain has made it so hard to make new friends. I cannot go out for coffee and talk to get to know others. I can’t have girlfriends over just to talk and drink margaritas because it causes me pain. I even get anxiety now about going to visit friends on weekends when my husband and I do because I know how much pain I will be in afterwards.

This pain has been hard on my family. This year I couldn’t fly home for Christmas because my headaches were just too bad and I needed to rest. It was heartbreaking for me to have to call and say I was canceling my flight home because of this pain I hate.

And before you ask, yes I have tried things, and yes we have hope for a few things that will greatly help me soon that we just found out about and we are so thankful for those!

But this pain, this pain that I hate, this pain is also a gift. My dear friend Whitney, who has been gracious to keep in touch with me via email through all this sent me this quote about a year ago, “Comfort is the god of our generation, so suffering is seen as a problem to be solved, and not a providence from God." – Matt Chandler. I have spent so many hours thinking about how to solve this pain (which in some part is completely necessary) that I haven’t really focused on the gift of it.

You see, up until this point in my life, I had read all the Bible passages about suffering with joy and either had one of two responses. I would either memorize the verse to use as a simple saying to give to someone who was suffering (OMG can’t believe I thought that was a good idea), or I would just wonder how the verse could even contain any truth (how the heck can you be joyful and suffer?!?).

I am no theologian, but I know that in order for suffering to be some wonderful providence from God, his character would have to be inately good. If God isn’t good, then this suffering isn’t a gift, it’s a curse.

So is this God of the Bible really who he says he is? Did he really create the world out of love, and call it good? Did he really walk with the Israelites in the wilderness for 40 years and comfort and redeem them every time they seemed to fall so short?

Did he really redeem the world through Jesus on the cross out of love and thus redeem us through it? Does Jesus really know my suffering? Can he be both the high priest (God) and our wonderful counselor? Is he really “God enough” to redeem us and “man enough” to understand the utter pain and brokenness at every corner of this world we live in?

The ironic thing is before I began having this pain, I struggled with these questions in college ( and still struggle guys) . It got to the point where I told my Christian friends that I was over it. That Jesus seemed like some absurd made up man. And I wondered what the point of life could even be. If there isn’t a real personal god (I wondered), then how is love even more than a chemical reaction? How does my life have a purpose? If people are no more than cells, why are we so sad when they die or become ill?

I looked into other religions and post modernism and they just didn’t stack up to me. I couldn’t see how many of them were historically accurate nor did they make sense of our inner make ups, longings and desires. So I decided at 21 to give this Jesus one more chance. I prayed and basically told God to give me evidence because I wasn’t going to just “have faith and believe”. And within 24 hours, the books, youtube videos of renowned scholars and video debates, the friends, and people I now call beloved friends came into my life.

And I learned that this life of Jesus, his death on the cross, his resurrection can be actually historically proven. That this God of the Bible is the ONLY god who claims to actually BE Love. That this God is the only one who meets our longings and desires inside our hearts.

So what the heck is all this about? How does this have to do with my current day to day suffering? You see, at age 21 I learned that the character of God is good. That he really is the sustainer of this world and even of my tiny little life. That my suffering is not hidden from him. That there is no where I can go outside of the boundaries of his love. And that my life has purpose.

My suffering is a gift EVEN if I cannot see it. And my suffering is not without hope. Because this God of the Bible, he hates to see this suffering we are in. It breaks his heart even more than it breaks ours and that is why he redeemed it through Jesus and he promises to one day bring heaven down to earth and renew this broken world we live in.

Sounds crazy right? I agree. It is so incredibly hard for me to even think about anything like that. I used to feel like a “bad Christian” because I couldn’t even picture that in my mind, let alone really believe it. But I trust this: that Jesus is who he says he is, that he did rise from the dead, that he is God and so what he says is true.

So do I still feel hopeless in this pain? Yes. A LOT. My husband and I get frustrated in our marriage because I can’t talk to him much without pain. And he is tired of seeing me in pain. And I feel so dang lonely all the time. And I am tired of the pain, and long for a “normal” life for awhile.

But I am slowly (and I mean slowwwwwwwly) learnging to understand that my hope really is found in Jesus’ blood and righteousness. This world will always have suffering, whether it be ours’ or our neighbors. But there is a truth: That one day this will be over. That this world will be redeemed, made new. That we will know a world without suffering because we have known Jesus.

“We will feast in the house of Zion. We will sing with our hearts restored. He has done great things, we will say together. We will feast and weep no more.” –We Will Feast in the House of Zion, Sandra Macracken

Suggested reads: The Reason For God (Tim Keller); Mere Christianity (C.S. Lewis)