BP144
I talked to a handful of people who have experienced chest, jaw, and left arm pain. Some of them sought medical help only to be told it was pain radiating from shoulder tendinitis. Others went to the ER and discovered they had experienced a heart attack and were able to get help that gave them hope for many years of life.
I know (knew) one man who attempted to dismiss the discomfort in his chest for months. He tried to ignore the pain or lessen it with pain killers and alcohol. He even took stomach antacids, hoping the problem was his stomach.
One night, when he was staying in a hotel while on a business trip, this man began experiencing severe chest pain and stumbled out of his room and into the lobby of the hotel. He told the people gathered there that he was having a heart attack and didn’t want to die alone. He had people with him that night, but, sadly, he did die in that hotel lobby.
What wisdom can we take away from this man’s tragic end?
Here’s one possible takeaway: If we’re experiencing physical pain, don’t ignore it or deny its presence or try to make it go away or take medications that will only temporarily mask the discomfort. Instead, listen to it, take it seriously, figure out what our bodies are telling us that we need to hear. After all, God designed us to experience pain and other symptoms when something is wrong with our bodies.
The same is true relative to emotional/psychological pain: when you experience symptoms in your psyche, pay attention. God has built you to manifest symptoms when something is wrong with your soul. Your symptoms might be anxiety, depression, an unhealthy relationship with food, insomnia, obsessive thoughts and compulsive behaviors, suicidal ideation, panic attacks, even physical pain triggered by deeply suppressed emotion.
I have written a few other posts about how our current culture seems to deal with psychological pain by making it go away without listening to it. We medicate our brains to balance neurotransmitters while ignoring the mind because we more often believe that the biological causes psychological symptoms instead of believing that the mind causes the physical symptoms in our bodies.
Please hear me, I’m not saying we should ignore the brain or that we shouldn’t begin by ruling out physiological etiology first when our bodies experience physical pain. Not at all. What I am saying, however, is that we are living in a culture that increasingly downplays or disavows the mind, the soul, the spiritual.
Symptoms are less often believed to have their roots in our souls and more often seen as originating in our bodies since the body is the only reality we have. The world is only material. There is no God, or if there is, god is pantheistic, flowing out of the new age (actually the old age since these beliefs have been around for millennia) belief that there is no personal God we can have a relationship with but only impersonal eastern spirituality.
(Do any of you remember the line in the old song, Dust in the Wind, that says, “All we are is dust in the wind”? That line is an amazingly accurate representation of the material view of the world.)
We are living in an age when people are quick to assume that their emptiness, depression, and lack of clear identity must be related to gender issues instead of to their relationship or lack thereof with the God who created them. People look to their mortal bodies as the temples where they will find hope and peace instead of looking to immortal, eternal God as the source of their salvation, peace, and identity.
The primary point of this brief post is this: Don’t allow yourself to be absorbed into a postmodern, relativistic world that assumes that pain and discontentment and emptiness are symptoms to be removed as soon as possible by whatever means possible whether it be drugs, alcohol, world travel, sex addiction (and any other addiction), gender reassignment, accumulation of wealth, vehicles, clothes, houses, extreme sports—you name it.
If you believe in God or are seeking God, know that He will speak to you through His word, His Spirit, and also through your symptoms. Don’t just make your psychological pain go away. Don’t just take meds or find strategies to compartmentalize your anxiety or detach from your symptoms. Listen to what they are saying, to what He is saying—from a place in the universe that is far deeper than the Mariana Trench.
As I have mentioned before, mental illness most of the time is relational. Symptoms of mental illness point to a disruption in your relationships with God, other people, or your own heart. Remember what DTFL has said before: if the True Self God made you to be is not coming up through the Well of Intimacy, you will come out through the symptoms of Leakage or through the Volcano.
Know that you are living a fleeting existence in a transient world that is not about being comfortable or pain free all the time although we all enjoy comfort and pain free bodies and hearts. Life is about listening for and identifying your eternal purpose on this planet–what this temporal existence is preparing you for eternally.
The truth is that if you are living far from God, distant from others, maybe even disconnected from your own soul, you will experience symptoms. Sometimes they will be severe. These symptoms are not to be sedated away.
Pain has a message whether it be physical pain warning you about an imminent heart attack, or whether it is emotional pain/mental illness warning you that you are not forgiving others, or hiding from others due to shame, or attempting to replace your God-given hunger for relationships by hungering for fleeting pleasures, or suppressing the truth that you have been made by God for God, or not relying on God or other’s due to your belief that you must be strong and self-sufficient, or laboring under legalism and your own belief that you have to be good instead of surrendering to God’s amazing grace that says He has already made you perfect via His sacrificial love.
Your pain may be telling you that something is separating you from relationships and love. Very possibly your own coping skills or false beliefs or sin or Satan’s accusations are separating you from God, leaving you confused about His presence and care for you, and ready to deconstruct your faith.
So, listen to your pain. Don’t muffle it. Don’t assume you should numb the ache in your soul at all costs. Slow down and pay attention to it. If you work to listen, God will speak to you in it.
Symptoms may save your life. Eternally.
“One of the main ways we move from abstract knowledge about God to a personal encounter with him as a living reality is through the furnace of affliction” ~ Tim Keller
“God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world” ~ C.S. Lewis
“So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal” ~ 2 Corinthians 4:16-18