Pastor's Blog: A Time to Embrace the Pain
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Pain is one of the things healthy human beings do their best to avoid. None of us goes looking for it, in all likelihood because we know that it will eventually come our way. Pain is unavoidable in the course of this life.
Yet, as any health care provider would tell you, when pain does come our way, we are wise to pay attention to it. While unavoidable, pain is also instructive; which is why when you go to the doctor with any form of pain, the first question your doctor usually asks is, “Tell me where it hurts.” Divulging the source of your pain is the first peg in the doctor’s protocol for knowing how best to treat it.
Maybe that’s a spiritual exercise we need to consider in these strange and unique times in which we’re living. Instead of ruing our pain, what might we learn if we were to embrace it and explore it? What might our pain be telling us in terms of what we have prioritized or elevated? What might it tell us in terms of our priorities? What might it teach us in terms of our deepest needs?
This coming week is the perfect time for us to ask ourselves these questions. Holy Week is God’s invitation to follow Jesus as he no doubt asked himself these very same questions as he made his way to the cross. Beginning with Palm Sunday, Jesus surely found the adulation of the crowds to be God’s encouragement for what the coming days would bring, in spite of the fact that the same crowd cheering him on that Palm Sunday would be jeering him by that coming Friday. Each day in the week Jesus became more and more aware of how the cross was the sole means by which God’s redemptive purposes might be fulfilled and how through his painful death others might know abundant life.
While we won’t be able to gather as we have in years past for our Holy Week services each day, we will offer the Wednesday MBBC Midweek experience on Facebook Live and will stream both the Maundy Thursday and Good Friday services on both our church website and the Facebook Live platforms. I’d invite you to begin now to make preparations for each of these services, and especially to secure elements for communion so that you will be able to participate in that part of the Maundy Thursday service.
The word salvation in both the Old and New Testaments carries connotations of healing. On the cross Jesus took upon himself our pain and on Easter God’s power redeemed it when He raised Jesus from the dead. Therefore, one day, as the book of Revelation promises, one day “He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away” (Rev. 21:4).
I know you’re about ready for this present order to pass away. I am as well. But let’s not miss the chance it gives us to embrace the pain and in some way employ it so that we might identify more deeply with what Jesus went through for our salvation. Then the healing that comes to us will surely move us a bit closer to the wholeness we yearn for and give us a most needed glimpse of the redemption that in God’s time and by God’s power will be made complete.
“I want to know Christ – yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, attaining to the resurrection of the dead” (Philippians 3:10-11).