One of the occupational hazards of ministry is the increased exposure to other people\u2019s pain.\u00a0Not that ministry is any more painful than any other profession, but like an x-ray tech is exposed to more radiation than normal, ministry exposes one to a lot of pain. If I\u2019ve learned anything in the past 23 years of ministry, it is this:<\/p>\n
Everyone I know is in pain\u2026 this means you, and me, too.<\/p>\n
Pain comes to us in an infinite number of different ways, nearly all of which can fit into four categories: emotional, physical, psychological, and spiritual. The experience of pain is an inevitable part of living. Lately, however, I\u2019ve been thinking about how much pain we cause one another. How much pain is just a part of life \u2013 a toothache, a kidney stone, childbirth \u2013 and how much pain is self-inflicted by the human race \u2013 war, selfishness, infidelity, abuse \u2013 avoidable yet still a constant part of the world we have made out of God\u2019s good creation.<\/p>\n
I think pain is a theological issue of the utmost importance. So much of Christian theology and ethics occurs in the\u00a0analytic\u00a0or theoretical realm. Pain is lived, by all of us.<\/em> This makes pain, and a theology of pain, something more than theoretical. Precisely because pain is common to all of us, Christians need to be able to think about it in terms of our own discipleship.<\/p>\n C.S. Lewis\u2019 famous line is that pain is God\u2019s \u201cmegaphone to rouse a deaf world.\u201d Richard Rohr always says that all great spirituality is connected to what we do with our pain. We can either allow the pain we experience to transform us as we allow God to take our pain and use it to birth something redemptive (for which the resurrection is an archetype), or we can transmit our pain to those around us. We can take our pain and make it other people\u2019s pain.<\/p>\n How much pain are you transmitting to those around you every day?<\/p>\n Our culture is uniquely suited to help us transmit our pain to one another. Everyday I read a snarky Facebook status from a friend who is in so much pain that it is literally oozing from every pore. So they fire of a tweet or update their status and boom : everyone else can feel the pain for awhile.<\/p>\n To my thinking, these three things are true:<\/strong><\/p>\n What does transformation of pain look like?<\/strong><\/p>\n Your ability to participate in the mission of God is dependent, in large part, upon what you decide to do with your pain. If you are not aware of your own pain, aware of where it comes from, and how it manifests itself in your life; if you have not yet been honest with yourself and at least one other person about your pain, then your pain is not being transformed by God, and you are transmitting it to those around you. You are on a mission of destruction.<\/p>\n Christianity teaches us that transformed people can transform people as God\u2019s healing begins to work its way into their lives. If you allow God to heal you, God will also make you an agent of his healing. \u00a0What\u2019s it going to be?<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" One of the occupational hazards of ministry is the increased exposure to other people\u2019s pain.\u00a0Not that ministry is any more painful than any other profession, but like an x-ray tech is exposed to more radiation than normal, ministry exposes one to a lot of pain. If I\u2019ve learned anything in the past 23 years of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1118,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[30,251,249,13,250],"class_list":["post-1169","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-c-s-lewis","tag-discipleship","tag-pain","tag-richard-rohr","tag-transformation"],"yoast_head":"\n\n
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