Living with pain.

That is where this all begins.

Pain: physical discomfort or distress.  Mental or emotional suffering or torment.  A distressing or unpleasant sensation.  Bodily suffering.  Someone or something that causes trouble or makes you feel annoyed or angry.

Depression.  Headaches.  Fibromyalgia.  Loneliness.  Nerve damage.  Anxiety.  Fatigue.  Illness.  Disease.  Hormonal imbalance.  Trauma.  Injury.  Divorce.  Infertility.  Arthritis.  Autoimmune disorder.  Irritable bowel.  Irritable spouse.  Sciatica.  Bipolar.  Cancer.  Grief.  Fear.  Migraines.  Tension.  Disfigurement.  Loss.  Doubt.  Delay.  Insecurity.

Have you ever lived with pain?

Have you ever lived with pain that wouldn’t go away?

It changes you, doesn’t it?  In ways you could never have expected.

I had a vision of my adult years—what my marriage would look like, my home life, my relationships.  I knew the type of parent I wanted to be, the type of professional I wanted to be, the type of person I wanted to be.  I fully expected those things to play out, as we always expect in our years of hopeful innocence.  

I didn’t picture antidepressants.  Or pain meds.  Or hormones.  I didn’t picture weight gain.  Or fatigue.  Or brain fog.  I didn’t picture sitting completely checked out at the dinner table while my family made ridiculous puns and sang ridiculous songs and laughed ridiculously hard.  I didn’t picture my teenage daughter reverting to her toddler years and waking me up in the middle of the night sobbing and unable to sleep.  I didn’t picture not having the energy to cook dinner or pursue goals or get through a day of counseling clients or training leaders.  I didn’t picture having to spend days on end curled up in bed every time the weather turned me into a human barometer.  I didn’t picture my daughter having to leave school, having to delay graduation, having to spend three weeks in the Cleveland Clinic.

I didn’t picture THIS.

But THIS is my life.  And I’m still walking out the painful lesson that you can either protest your life or persevere through it.

I read, as I was getting ready to write tonight, that the word “pain” comes from the Latin “poena” meaning a fine, a penalty.

I must confess, given that the commitment here is to honesty—there have been times I have looked upon these pieces of my life and questioned if they were, indeed, punishment.  Perhaps even believed it, at points.

Have you ever felt the same?

And, if we’re all honest, isn’t this line of questioning just a more personal variation on the age-old question, How can a good and loving God allow suffering?  Let alone seemingly inflict it?

My faith tells me there must be a better way to define pain and suffering—that which is the compost out of which hope is fertilized and takes deep and steady root.  A way of viewing it from within the context of a plan that is not meant to harm but to incite that same hope.  A way of holding it up to the light in such a way that it catches the rays of the sun at just the right angle and transforms from something dark and jagged and hard into something of iridescence and beauty and worth.  A way of living a dual-promise life—both In this world you will have trouble AND Take heart, I have overcome the world.  A way of truly considering it JOY—of all things, JOY?—when we face trials of many kinds.

Ann Voskamp writes, in One Thousand Gifts,

Joy and pain, they are but two arteries of the one heart that pumps through all those who don’t numb themselves to really living. 

How often have I numbed myself thinking anesthesia was the best medicine for one living with their heart cut open?  And how deeply I regret it.  Moments spent sedated on the sidelines while my life played out in front of me.

But joy and pain must go together, as Ann suggests, as if two sides of the same organ, pumping blood to our extremities.  One receiving, one sending.  Circulating all that is life-giving to all within us that needs life.

I picture Joy, from Inside Out, holding all her yellow memory balls in the Memory Dump, experiencing, for the first time, her own sadness as she wept for the child she could not shelter from pain.  I know this feeling.  This sinking-in-the-pit-of-your-stomach mixture of grief and fear and unbearable ache.  But I know, too, even better than Joy, that every happy moment is somehow connected to a sad moment elsewhere, and that it is only in the darkness of pain and loss that the light of joy can shine the brightest.  Blue and yellow, swirling together, but never making green.

I can see the truth of this.  I can identify the darkness of pain amplifying in my own life the moments of joy, making seem them brighter, louder, fuller.  This I can receive.

But if pain is not punishment—if it is indeed not intended to inflict us or to penalize us—it is at the very least a leash that restricts and restrains us, is it not?

And this one I’m having a harder time with. 

I remember, growing up, walking our dog on occasion, and I remember how his silver little body would pull with such force—always, ALWAYS pulling.  As we only walked him when we were camping, he was never actually taught to heel—at home his limits were clear.  Doors.  Fence.  He didn—t need to heel in the backyard, he just needed to stay within the boundaries. 

But once that leash went on and the door to the car or camper was open, he would immediately strain at the leash, ready to run, ready to explore, ready to hunt, ready to GO.

Can you relate?

Now, imagine me a short little schnauzer, and imagine that they’ve forgotten to bring the harness which means the leash is instead attached to my choker-chain collar and as I am lurching and lunging I am also choking and coughing and gagging because between the leash and they collar they are not only holding me back, they are also choking the life out of me.

Can you relate to THAT?

I’ve dealt with chronic pain and hormonal depression my entire life and always managed to be highly functional.  To even, at times, be incredibly successful.

But something has changed in these past five years and I find myself, most days, struggling just to be functionalish.  

And when the pain and the fatigue become a leash that limits me to a six-foot radius around the spot to which it is anchored…

Everything in life changes.

It begins with pain.

But that isn’t where it ends.  

Somewhere along this journey, I hope to make peace with that which restricts and restrains—to see it through transformational lenses and to allow what I see there to then transform ME.  I hope to learn, along with my daughter, the cessation of striving that comes from willing surrender rather than this resistance in continual tug-of-war with resignation.

I hope to learn, to take a line from one of my favorite books, Acceptance with Joy.

Pain and joy.  They CAN go hand in hand.

But to get there, we must take pain’s hand, first.

We can resist it or receive it.

The choice is up to us.

acceptance chronic pain hope limits loss pain surrender