Living With Chronic Pain – Spiritual Healing – Does Prayer Help?
Oftentimes we relate to God based upon our needs, our personalities and our environment. And when living with chronic pain all of these things try to take precedence over the importance of having an intimate relationship with Him.
During many painful times for me, prayer seemed meaningless. It was as if I was falling back on random, emotional pleas for help. My humanness and weakness became more exposed. In hindsight, I probably had to go through this phase of doing something that appeared spiritually disciplined, for example, trying to pray for longer periods of time. As a result, I tried to pray from the core of my heart. It was like shooting arrows into the air, not knowing if my prayers might actually hit the intended target. It seemed like there were no immediate results in correlation to my petitions for help, discussions of confession and gut-wrenching sorrow for my own self-sufficiency.
Looking back upon those times, they almost don’t seem real. In essence, those times mimicked convoluted stages of grief. Prayer made me honest about myself and where my place was within this world.
Then I went through a profoundly layered process of unlearning what I had previously learned as a Christian. Pain tore down the walls of the meaningless things about the religious life. And prayer helped me to see God differently. Beforehand, I viewed pain as His way to forcefully make me to love and respect Him and to conform to rigid Church doctrine. But this was simply untrue. Through pain and prayer, I learned to love the things that really counted, which included the gift of my own humanity and the reality of God.
As I really grew in God, my prayer life became more deliberate, self-controlled and sober-minded. The focus of prayer was off my many needs and redirected toward the discovery of who I was and how was I really to please God. Longer periods of prayer time no longer included spontaneous outbursts from my mind. Rather, they included direct contemplation and study of the scriptures, and then praying those verses into my heart. God was down deep within me, speaking to me and changing the way I thought, the way I processed things about life, and most importantly, the way we’re suppose to love.
So basically, the answer to my original subject title, “Does Prayer Help?” In the context of pain or otherwise, my response is an emphatic yes!
I willingly share my story with you so you can extract anything from it that you want. Hopefully, shared excerpts from my life will help you in your struggle of dealing with chronic pain or losing weight or overcoming obstacles.
Keep me on your favorites. For more about living with chronic pain, as well as spiritual healing, visit me at www.gordonselley.com
To your health, Gordon Selley
