Quotes on Pain from Shining Gift of God

Image: Ray Brown.

Your experience of loss and grief is unique to you and God validates your pain as real and important.

Where humanity rarely treads divinity traipses every day; in the surreal. What is painful is also holy ground.

If we have learned anything at all about life until this point, it’s that pain has the purpose of compelling the instructiveness of experience.

If we prepare our hearts for the pain that will come eventually, we may endure the hardship better.

The Lord seems silent until pain bellows into the fissures of our mortal soul. At the loneliest of times, when we are so empty because we have accepted our weakness, and we need to remain weak to gather God’s power, we have access to Spiritual strength. This transcends our understanding. It can only ever be of God.

Then there are thoughts, also, for the joy that is purposed for us to experience, in contention with the pain, the work ahead, and the ongoing knowledge that our child will not reach a ‘normal’ human being’s potential.

We are not only healed of the painful nuances of the loss, we are found to learn resilience and the meaning of life.

We may be overwhelmed in pain. We might be at peace. We could be on top of our game. We might be interned in grief. We all ebb and flow through life.

We miss the opportunities that abound in life in the midst of sorrow. We tend to run or to resent, but to run or resent is to miss the point, because we do not like pain. But pain is inherent in life. God will show us, if we journey within our sorrow, making a home for it, not pushing it away in denial or anger or bargaining, that there is only blessing beyond the sorrow – for God is met there!

Given that hardship is the proving ground of faith, we have the opportunity of embracing the very thing that propels us toward maturity. But it is so tempting to take the easy route. We so often choose pleasure over pain.

Sorrowful seasons are bruising but bettering. As we step forth in the day of annihilation – where soul and spirit are split asunder, with pain – we are greeted by a companion who will never let go; who will show us who we are as he will show us who he is.

We understand that God can use the pain we endure; that it will further soften our hearts to the tremendous human need we might be privileged to minister into. Preparing for an unspeakable moment of pain intuits anxiousness, but the peace of God is a calm pond amidst the hues of sunrise. What is felt is the truth of what’s about to take place, but there is no pain; no undue stress. If anything I’ve been stressed because of a different and equally important matter, and presently, I just battle to keep up with the demands of running a household.

Love will carry us like a bridge over the chasm of our baby’s death. God’s love is like that. It is the power to endure much pain in the hope it will mean something one day.

All sources of fear, despair, anguish, and grief are subject to quelling, because of the Lord. None of these issues of pain are beyond the faculties of the grace that saves us. None of the foreboding influence in the “waves and wind” will hold us apart from the Presence of the Lord, manifest in the Holy Spirit.

Grief is a reality that I am positively sure God meant for our good in this broken world of ours. I can say this having been touched by God in grief eleven years ago, to know that in the pain of that reality where I groaned day after day, month after month, there was a relief that could only come from God. Such a relief was available for the moment of reliance. Such a relief was also, ultimately, from a present-day viewpoint, a sustainable relief.

Brokenness and neediness involve pain. And the best ways of soothing pain toward the acceptance of brokenness and healing is loving community.

Nothing can dissuade us from joy if we are able to comprehend, apply and experience this truth: pain is a gift. We never say it at the time, however.

The best way to meet pain is to embrace it. What we cannot change must, in all wisdom, be accepted. It’s foolishness to go against the flow and know it won’t work. Pain comes. It has to be met.

Let the grieving person find out for themselves that something good comes out of pain. That’s just the dignifying thing to do.

Grief is a consequence of love lost. When we first grieve right, entering into the hell of a time where loss is like dying, we endure great pain, but such pain is never a waste, though it may seem exactly like life and joy are finished.

There is no life like the life that God gives us to see the truth, to honour it, and to embrace the painful reality with courage.

But the processes I deliberately go into to grieve – deliberately, because they evoke a deeper pleasure inculcated in pain because of sorrow – are essentially sacred; they are so not of the world and are therefore so pivotally spiritual.

We can trust grief. It is a transforming thing; a process of renewal is under way. But we need faith to endure moments of pain that come without warning. If we endure the moment, negotiating it, finding we can do it, enduring the moment becomes easier.

The occurrence of sadness so thick with meaning takes us into a cherished place of living experience. How could anyone not want God when he shows us how wonderful the experience of sorrow is – a sadness not without pain, but a sadness, all the same, that makes up for the pain endured by a sense of meaning that blesses us most viscerally.

Whatever we choose to do we give ourselves to the process of feeling all the pain we can, enrolling the fullest surrender and release into the adhering to our anguish. Critically, we take God in there with us. As we sob and bawl we pray. We communicate with God in whatever way feels comfortable, knowing no mood or words are offensive to the Lord who knows our pain.

Every human being feels pain — it is perpetual to the human experience. Pain is a condition of life this side of eternity.

Is there a purpose to pain, and is there a biblical answer? It’s a “yes” to both questions.

Perhaps the only way to grow closer to God is through such an experience of humbly accepting the pain that comes our way. Here is part of the wonder of pain. We become inwardly shaped and matured people through the furnace of affliction. In simple terms, we grow.

We never suffer alone. Yet, it’s only those truly of Christ who can identify properly with and gain from the purpose and wonder of pain — in its true and original context.

Pain, if we can accept it and embrace it, can be the most direct route into gain.

We must go into the pain to receive him who alone may help.

Pain is never a waste, for there is no better teacher than pain. Her core subjects are Compassion, Kindness, Gentleness, and Patience.

Pain may not be necessary for growth, but pain is so often growth’s change agent.

We want to know if there is meaning in pain; if what we suffer will have a purpose.

Faith in situations of pain doesn’t seem anything like heroism; it’s survival.

Seasons of pain are repetitive enough to make us sick inside. Too much déjà vu!

Déjà vu (literally, “already seen”) is okay when it involves pleasure, but not pain.

“God won’t waste your pain” is a cliché, because it represents a potential reality to come.

Loneliness is the emotion we’re left with when pain visits only our person.

Pain restores the sentiment of our sensibilities. Priorities are quickly reordered.

To talk with freedom, to walk with grace, and to sit in our pain; these are great aids to the process for healing the grief we experience in our losses.

We shrink from the deeper life when the pain comes. We cannot have the heights if we are not prepared to go to the depths. It’s just the way life is.

Hope transcends all experience of anguish in the knowledge that God goes with us as we tread into healing by entering into pain.

Honouring sorrow’s reality is faith. Knowing God is healer is strength. Stepping into and through pain is courage. Persisting with spiritual discomfort is endurance. Endurance is maturity. Choosing joy is hope.

It comes to most at least once in their lives... pain unrivalled in previous experience. We feel worse than death; at least in death the pain of life is over for the person in question.

Pain’s perspective is hardly something accurately portrayed across the expanse of humanity. We all experience pain so diversely given there are many variables at play.

Our pain is precious to God, and our Lord will bring healing from within the site of our pain if we will let him. This pain that I experience is a most precious grief that I cannot live without, because it is the sacredness of memory that has come to be part of me now.

Love suffers the bruising incredulity of loss meekly by soothing the pain through acceptance. Love wishes to do a work of acceptance in every one of us.

The requiem of our repose in loss are tears not of overcoming pain, but of richness of experience with God’s Presence.

We think only in terms of our pain. God’s perspective hardly registers. God’s perspective superintends our pain. It contains our pain. But God’s perspective is utterly voluminous.

We learned in our pain that very little can be done other than to be patient in the midst of moments that cannot be reconciled.

Shining Gift of God – A Memoir of the Life of Nathanael Marcus is being launched on 13 October at the 2018 Silent Grief Conference in Perth, Western Australia. Details for buying a copy of the book: https://www.amazon.com.au/Shining-Gift-God-Memoir-Nathanael-ebook/dp/B08BZ861BH