Been thinking about pain a lot these past few days. Been in a lot of pain these last few days. Had my right knee replaced this past Wednesday, and while my experience has not been as painful as many who have gone before me have described it to me, it has been plenty painful enough. My inbox has been full top the brim with encouragement to stick to it; it is worth the effort and the pain. Although I do think someone needs to make a song and and number like this for physical therapists. (For the record my PT, Jacob, is a good man and just doing his job, but at least I was asleep when the surgeon sliced me open.) But, how do we as a culture deal with pain?
Our pandemic experience was largely an effort to avoid pain, pain we did not avoid, we just spread out a bit all the while creating a thousand new pains. It seems to me that as a culture we have become too pain averse, rather than enduring it to our ultimate benefit. I commented to a friend yesterday after doing my exercises for the second time that day that it was kicking my butt much harder than two-a-day practices did back when football was more than a spectator sport in my life. His comment was simply that this was to a far more useful end. So I have been thinking about what pain does for us.
Both James and Paul tell fledgling churches to endure pain because such produces the kind of character God expects from us. The writer of Hebrews tells us to consider all the faith evident in history, faith in the good outcome of pain endured, and that for so many such outcome was never reached, but for us it was. I can already tell that the constant, nagging and sometimes debilitating arthritic pain that caused me to seek the knee replacement to begin with is abated. After my exercises, when I am as loose and as mobile as I can be at the moment, and even though still on a walker, I can feel how much better my life will be when the surgical scar is healed and the muscles insulted by the surgery are restored. As I ween myself off the opioids, my left knee reminds me it is next and I find myself looking forward to it. There is something to this whole “embrace the pain” thing.
But I think the key is the Hebrews passage cited above – faith. One has to have faith. Why do we find it easier to have faith in a deeply fallible doctor than in a perfect and Almighty God? As religion fades from our national consciousness, so too does it seems to our faith in good outcomes. How else could you explain the hideousness of the pandemic just past compared with all those that have come before?
Those that have worked so feverishly to remove Christianity from the public square need to understand that they have sacrificed far more than a community creche in the town square at Christmas.
And Now, INTERESTING ARTICLES OF THE WEEK
Read Salena Zito’s ode to Clairton, PA, where the coke plant blew up this past week – whether you care about the news or not – just because it is so damn well written.
You know how we all suspect China let covid loose so they did not lose ground in their efforts at world economic domination? What does this make you think about the whole EV market?
The history of the HEMI! What an American car ought to be. Two of my four vehicles bear HEMIs. There is a special sense of satisfaction in that.
California just keeps getting (dangerously) weirder. And more hostile. They seem so confident in this gerrymandering – again, never realizing how much the national mood has shifted.
When you hate someone so much you cannot serve him dinner – you are the one with the problem, not him.
