THE GIFT NOBODY WANTS

Tuesday, March 31, 2009

M. Scott Peck in his book, The Road Less Traveled said, "The symptoms and the illness are not the same thing. The illness exists long before the symptoms. Rather than being the illness, the symptoms are the beginning of its cures. The fact that they are unwanted makes them all the more a phenomenon of grace--a gift of God, a message from the unconscious, if you will, to initiate self-examination and repair."

That is why Dr. Paul Brand says with utter sincerity, "Thank God for pain!"

Philip Yancey in his marvelous book, Where Is God When It Hurts? writes, "I do not say that all pain is good. Sometimes it flares up and makes life miserable. For someone with crippling arthritis or terminal cancer, pain dominates so much that any relief, especially a painless world, would seem like heaven itself. But for the majority of us, the pain network performs daily protective service. It is effectively designed for surviving life on this sometimes hostile planet."

How about you? Have you, a friend or a loved one struggled through pain but realized that it was that pain that caused you to get the help you needed to avoid a greater pain?