Reframing Our Pain
I’ve been thinking a lot about pain lately.
A couple of things have made me want to write about pain. For one thing, there are several in our fellowship who have been experiencing pain for months, even years. I saw one of them at church recently, and she was (as always) smiling. I asked her how she’s doing. She told me she had listened to Joni Eareckson Tada speak about pain.
Joni has been a quadriplegic since her teens. When Joni speaks about pain, she speaks with wisdom and authority. She has experienced a lifetime of both psychological and physical pain, so she knows whereof she speaks. Something Joni said helped my friend reframe her pain. When I inquired about how she was feeling, my friend told me that no, she is not feeling better, but she is doing better.
“Not feeling better but doing better.” That phrase has created a whole new paradigm for me to think about pain.
In my sermons I have sometimes described faith as “an expanded frame of reference.” Clearly, my friend had heard something from Joni that made her realize that there is a larger reality than her physical and psychological pain. My friend could “do better” not because Joni’s words alleviated her pain but because what she heard put her pain into a broader, hope-filled context.
I mentioned that there were two things that had made me want to write about pain.
The other thing is an author interview I heard on the podcast Mere Fidelity. John Andrew Bryant has suffered from obsessive compulsive disorder for many years. His new book – A Quiet Mind to Suffer With: Mental Illness, Trauma, and the Death of Christ – describes what it’s like to deal with mental illness as a Christian.
In his interview Bryant speaks of how he manages the intrusive thoughts of his OCD. Like those in our fellowship who struggle with persistent pain – Bryant can’t make the unwanted thoughts go away, but he can respond to them from a broader context. Those intrusive thoughts, he said, are like a neighbor’s car alarm. You might not be able to silence the alarm, but you can realize that you don’t need to respond. It’s not your car, so you can go about your business even though the noise continues.
In other words, Bryant learned to reframe the pain of his intrusive thoughts by expanding his imaginative frame of reference.
He also said that traumatized people are sometimes uncomfortable with being around others in a church setting. When they are reluctant to commit to fellowship, the church’s best response is patient engagement offline: a cup of coffee and casual conversation with a Christian friend away from the church building. It may take years, says Bryant, but that’s the kind of patient, healing work that we must commit to if we want to help traumatized people.
In other words, if we want to play a role in helping traumatized people heal, we need to reframe their pain and healing by expanding our chronological frame of reference.
Scripture has much to say about suffering.
The Psalms are full of lamentation – “How long, O Lord?” – the cries of a man whose suffering is caving in on him, causing him to lose his frame of reference. “How long?” is a cry to God for rescue from a world that is collapsing, and hope is slipping away.
The New Testament epistles encourage us to reframe our pain by explaining suffering in terms of God’s greater purposes:
“We rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope” (Rom 5:3-4).
“Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness” (Jam 1:2-3).
And from our sermon series in 1 Peter: “You have been grieved by various trials, so that the tested genuineness of your faith—more precious than gold that perishes though it is tested by fire—may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ (1 Pet 1:6-7).
So long as we live in this broken world, with our own broken bodies and minds, among others who are likewise broken, we will both cause and experience pain.
But the hope of the Gospel reframes our pain twice over:
1. Our lives are in the hands of our Sovereign Lord, and He is wise and good. He knows what He’s doing, as He knew what He was doing with the pain of His own Son. He can be trusted, even when our pain is intense and persistent. Because we know His character – His wisdom and His love – we can be sure that our pain is never for nothing.
2. Our pain will not have the final word. When we get to the End, we will be not just satisfied but delighted. As Paul put it so well, “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us” (Rom 8:18).
And we can say with the old Puritan prayer:
Grant that I may be salted with suffering,
with every exactment tempered to my soul,
every rod excellently fitted to my back,
to chastise, humble, break me.
Let me not overlook the hand that holds the rod,
as Thou didst not let me forget the rod that fell on Christ,
and drew me to Him. (Valley of Vision)
Persevere, Paul Pyle Pastor of Discipleship