Living With Chronic Pain – Spiritual Healing – Discover What You Don’t Know
Imagine feeling trapped in despair, being cornered mentally and emotionally, not knowing or even caring where you might go if you escaped from this prison…
Though you’ve done nearly everything in your life with above average effort, fairly good decision-making and with honorable intentions, this doesn’t provide complete insulation from unexpected trials and the adverse affects of emotional pain. So when you’re in the middle of the junk, how do you get yourself out? Do you continue to do everything according to what you already know? Or do you make other choices foreign to your ways of living?
If we keep making decisions based upon our previous knowledge and experience, might we not simply repeat our mistakes and find ourselves in the same place of despair? Most likely.
This concept of discovering what you don’t know is not limited to alternative intellectualism. In other words, this model does not hinge exclusively on acquiring additional education, counseling or gleaning more from life experiences. It has to do more with learning about spiritual things, in particular, those that pertain to faith.
Quite frankly, discovering new territories of faith can be quite frustrating because you do not have the exact instructions of how to do this. Yet it is faith that will drive you to seek the important things about your own heart, such as how to live better or more purposefully. Once you find the core answers of the heart, then you can place your hope on something that will rescue you from the quagmire of sinking sand. Typically the solutions to overcoming obstacles or dealing with despair are typically not found outside within stuffy institutions or from dust-covered textbooks. Oftentimes, the key to finding your answers lies within the light of God and amidst your community of kindred friendships.
For Christians, these answers are found with certainty in Jesus Christ. Not in the theological or historical context or even behind the closed doors of the traditional church. As the practical answers seem to elude us when times seem worse, I strongly urge you to stop for a moment. Maybe your idea of faith is wrapped in finding the answers you want to see or based upon the solutions that are familiar and comfortable to your own knowledge base. This is not discovering faith.
Faith is different. It’s about dealing with your troubles head-on, without avoidance or denial. But practically, it’s also about letting go of what you know for the moment and to place your beliefs into fully trusting God for his practical help to pull you out of darkness. How many of us have said I agree with this last statement, but what happens next? I don’t feel pulled out of the flames. In fact, the fire appears to be spreading throughout my whole life. It’s getting worse and no one can really help me. In fact, others who once seem to care about me and professed the Christian doctrine only judge me now, saying I lack faith or sin must be stopping the progression of positive change. Although these tendencies exist within the Christian community, this does not mean that they are corrective or restorative for the human heart.
Because of faith in Jesus Christ, he will transform you surely from within, and as a result, you will develop a solid hope in the future. This idea of hope in eternal life and great things to come will realistically pull you – mentally, emotionally and physically – from your pit of despair. In fact, you will marvel at the results of change, and more importantly, you will tingle inside about the realness of God. You will begin to see that his love will overcome darkness in every area of your life. This is a journey of discovering things you didn’t know before. It’s a journey of faith, hope and love operating in concert to mend you from brokenness into wholeness.
Keep me on your favorites. Please click onto www.gordonselley.com for more information about living with chronic pain, as well as spiritual healing.
