Escorted by Pain

“Sometimes pain escorts us to places we would never have gone on our own.”

Loren Thornburg

Pain is painful.  You can’t ignore it.  It begs for your attention and forces you to attend to it.  Never have I wished for pain, yet I am reminded of the healing that comes because it was painful.  I would have missed the healing if pain had not escorted me there.  I would have ignored it and pretended that it wasn’t there if it hadn’t begged for my attention.  We see this example in our physical bodies.  The pain of a cut, broken bone or other ailment reminds us to clean it so that we will find healing from it. Our hearts are no different.  Pain reveals the parts of your heart that you don’t see.  Sometimes you don’t even know it’s there until the pain escorts you there.  Once you have been taken there you can either let it escort you to healing or choose to look the other way.  The catch is that if you don’t look at it now it will surface again later.  It will beg for your attention until it finds healing.  Your heart longs for healing.  Let pain escort you there.  

“Reveal your light and your faithfulness! They will lead me, they will escort me back to your holy hill, and to the place where you live.”

Psalm 43:3

In this psalm we see the longing of a troubled soul for God.  This is what pain does.  It reveals our deepest longing for our God.  We long for relationship and intimacy with Him for this is what we were created for.  In the pain our cry is for Him to come meet us in that place that we could see His light in that darkness and His faithfulness in what feels abandoned.  We need an escort and He is the only one that can do that.  This is the gospel.  God gave us Jesus, His son so that we could be escorted into intimacy with our Father, our God.  He wants all of us and is willing to allow us pain to get us.  He is the only one that can escort us from pain to the healing of our deepest pain and desire.  He is the only one that knows our pain, knows how to meet us there, and knows how to best lead us through that place.  He sees our pain and wants to accompany us to healing.  Let Him take you by the hand even now, even here.  He is your best escort.