Friday, January 29, 2010

Learning to Be At Peace with the Discomfort

What premium do you place upon your hurts? Consider your answer. If we’re not careful our hurts can harm us so greatly, they’ll quench the very spirit to love residing deep within us.

Hearts hurt most when they’re burdened devoid of hope. Yet, our very capacities to alleviate the hurts can truly grow in proportion to our efforts to acceptingly resist the sting of those hurts through a humble sort of courage—absorbing the rawness of the pain as it is. At ultimate strength no potential hurt will hurt us—our hearts prove strong and impervious.

It won’t be something new to you that hurts harm our esprit de corps—our fellowship, morale and success with others, from the “team” perspective. It seems obvious though we’d often act as if this were not true. We rage and fret with a hurt agitating inside us and it spills and burns like an acid over all those around us—and then back through ourselves through our regret. The well-known vicious cycle.

I mentioned beforehand that our hearts hurt when they’re burdened—we have a natural tendency to resist this as not many of us enjoy the pain of discomfort. Indeed, at the extremes some can’t stand it and they’ll fly into a fit of rage internally and even externally.

Yet, there’s a thing accorded it—something purposed for it; the pain of discomfort.

Can you just imagine the capacities and depths of our learning—of these small (and large), grating moments—if we could but not only endure them but also embrace them?

Enter the wondrous concept of divinely-modelled forgiveness. When we can forgive—even of ourselves—we discharge for ourselves the power of life and control over hurt. We smash hurt with the feather duster of forgiveness—the quickest way home to peace. We learn quickly that nothing could ever actually hurt us other than our own faulty misconception of things intended probably as neutral in the first event. It’s only the meaning we attach to them that detracts from our wellbeing.

Discomforts are an integral part of the design of life—for whatever reason. Your reason is your reason. You believe and therefore it “is” for you. We humans are really not a lot different from each other.

You can embrace the grating moment, learning it is actually your friend. Like the orgasm, there is pleasure and pain in everything we experience or feel; we must learn to accentuate the common pleasure and then live a cheap but rich life. Free then, our love can hence be costly, full of value and poise, wealthy in disposal.

Our hurts can’t harm us; not unless we let them.

The hugest hurt is the way to God. He can show you. He can show you how to turn that calloused sore into a beautifully mature scar that oozes his gentle grace, permeating through our being.

Our confidence is bolstered greatly in this revelation, when in one foul swoop we contend in nothing defeating us. Nothing hurts us in the outworking of the perfect will of God.

To know this is to know nothing else matters.

© 2010 S. J. Wickham.

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