What My Physical Therapist Taught Me Part 1: About Pain
A few weeks ago, my doctor replaced my arthritic knee with a new titanium joint. I’m now in the third week of rehabbing my new knee, and the going is slow.
A friend who is scheduled for knee replacement next month asked me what the rehab is like. I told her it is painful and incremental. One day of rehab is pretty much like the next: stretching, icing, resting, and walking, as the song says, “with painful steps and slow.” When you’re in physical rehab, everything takes forever, it hurts, and it is exhausting.
But the process would be much far more difficult had it not been for my first session with my physical therapist and the orientation he gave me when he told me about what to expect. And I have found myself thinking that what I’m learning now about rehabbing my knee is also true about how God uses pain in our lives.
This is the first of a three-part series on what I’m learning. This week and next we’ll look at two things the therapist said to help me orient myself for the rehab experience. The last week we’ll look at what I’ve learned about body ministry in my rehab.
1. The pain is part of the process.
Physical therapists have a reputation for cruelty. It’s as if the pain we experience is not a significant part of their calculations.
So the nicknames abound: “PT” stands for “pain and torture.” And they are not physical therapists but “physical terrorists.”
It’s true that physical therapists don’t seem to think about my pain the way I think about it. For them, my pain is only part of the larger equation: so long as the pain is manageable, I can continue with my rehab. The pain becomes significant only when it hinders that vital process.
We Americans regard pain as nothing more than a hindrance to our hard-charging way of life. We have a hard time seeing anything beneficial in pain. So we seek to avoid pain or, if we cannot avoid it, we want to numb it.
That Americanized approach to pain will not work in rehab. My new knee is surrounded by soft tissue that has been cut and stitched back together. All that tissue is tight, and after the surgery my knee was set in a semi-bent position.
If my only aim was to avoid and numb the pain, I would find the most comfortable position for my knee and rest it. But that’s not how rehab works; in my rehab I must slowly, incrementally loosen and strengthen those muscles.
But stretching those tissues is painful, and sometimes that pain is acute. (I call the room where I do my thrice-daily stretches the “torture chamber,” and more than once a family member has heard me cry out in pain through the closed door.)
The whole premise of these rehab stretches is that I must lean into the pain, not avoid it, not be discouraged by it. If I am doing my rehab correctly, I will be in a constant state of pain as I stretch and strengthen those soft tissues.
In other words, the pain of rehab is purposeful. It is taking me where I want to go.
If I take the path of least resistance laid out by my pain, I will never be whole. To move toward wholeness, I must embrace the pain as part of the process.
In my life with Christ, I cannot let pain avoidance shape my behavior.
Pain is sometimes part of God’s wise and good plan for my life, and I must trust Him in and through the suffering. He never allows meaningless pain into my life; it always serves His wise and good purposes to train me in godliness.
This is why the writer of the letter to the Hebrews said that we should not be dismayed by our painful difficulties; they are never for nothing. “For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it” Heb. 12:11).
And dealing with pain was the subject of James’s first exhortation: “Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing” (James 1:2-4).
So no, we cannot let our cultural bias against pain dictate our response. When God allows pain into our lives, we will of course want to mitigate it when we can. But we must also recognize that God often works through suffering; we must let Him do His good work in us by our pain.
(Important note: This is how we must respond to pain in our own lives; it’s not the kind of thing you say to a suffering friend. The appropriate response to someone else’s pain is lamentation. “Weep with those who weep.” When we wield advice to a sufferer instead of commiserating, we play the role of Job’s friends. They did the right thing for seven days; they grieved silently with the suffering friend. It was only when they tried to explain things that they made a mess.)
Next week we’ll look at the second thing I learned from the therapist:
2. The process is long-term, so I should calibrate my expectations accordingly.
In the meantime, lean into the pain that God has allowed into your life. He knows what He’s doing.
Persevere.
Paul Pyle
Discipleship Pastor