How to Deal with Pain You Can’t Fix

We spend a good amount of energy trying to avoid pain. Our bodies are created with nerves that are sensitive to pain; they send messages to our brain in an instant telling us to move our hand away from the flame, or letting us know we just stepped on something sharp.

We would be foolish to avoid those warnings. Otherwise, we’d be pretty mangled up people limping about our lives with missing body parts.

But there is another type of pain.

A kind I am equally desperate to avoid, and that is soul pain. Pain that lurks below the surface where there is broken relationships, dashed hopes, uncertain futures. This type of pain is the root of all kinds of anxiety as it creeps up within us and tells us to avoid this pain at all cost. But it’s not easy to avoid. You can’t just simply jerk your soul away from a broken relationship and act as though it didn’t burn you. We all get burned.

So how do we deal with that kind of pain?

I have a daughter with Asperger Syndrome.

She is the love of my life, but her life is really hard. There is a good chance that she will live with us her whole life because she will never be fully independent. She has been my mentor in this.

At night her anxiety runs really high, she is scared about her future and wonders why all her friends from school have gone on with their life, and most have left her behind. My gut is wrenched for her, I hurt with her, and I worry what will happen to her when I am gone.

Photo Credit: Mikaela Hamilton

I want to grab her and yank us both away from the flame of this soul crushing pain, but there is no where to go.

So I hold her.

And we sit there inside the pain.

It is a place of learning for her and me, I suppose. We are learning to accept life on life’s terms and not try to find a quick escape out of the loss that she feels, and her mom and I feel.

Now we have tried every quick fix plan to make it all ok, but there is a dangerous type of grace in this sort of pain, that won’t succumb to a quick fix. It is grace that teaches me that we are supposed to go through pain and not around it. Every attempt to find a highway around pain is cut off and we are left with this present moment to be here, together, and weep.

God tells us his perfect love casts out fear.

I used to scratch my head at the one. But I am starting to see what it means.

When we stand in our pain, wrap our arms around it, accept life on life’s terms, we learn we are not alone. There is another set of arms around us, the pain, the situation, this moment. Then the fear dissipates and gives way to hope, and love and faith. That there is The One who has gone through pain to bring life, and He holds us in our pain to create a new place within us, for his life to grow.

How to Deal with Pain You Can’t Fix is a post from: Storyline Blog