The loudest voice

 

God whispers in pleasure; Satan shouts in pain

"No pain, no gain."

It has to be one of the most cliched, trite, banal, oft-repeated throw-away (pick your synonym) maxims of the healthy, or those trying to be.

Nobody wants pain. Yet anytime I have overworked whatever muscles I have left in this old body of mine and get that soreness that inevitably comes the day after, down deep I am pleased. I know what it means: I’m better for it. If I do it enough, I’m getting stronger. I’ll look better, feel better, move better, just be better. And, unfortunately, to get “in shape,” such pain is inevitable.

If you ask the random guy on the street if he wants to endure some pain, he’s probably going to say, “absolutely not.”

But if you can talk to that same person for a while, you’ll probably find out that the periods of most growth – physically, or mentally, or professionally, or personally, or whatever – came during or after periods of some sort of pain.

Pain tells us when something is wrong. Pain tells us we’re getting better. Pain can encourage us to keep going.

Pain can also tell us we’re failures, that God doesn’t love us, that we might even wish we were dead.

Ironic – if I’m using that word correctly.

Lately, I’ve been asked a couple of times to speak about suffering. Not because I’ve personally suffered that much or even that extensively, but because I have some experience being with people who have or are going through some incredible times of suffering; in some cases, over a decade of intense suffering. I’ve had a front row seat to people I love who have had to deal with constant, almost unbearable pain; curl up on the floor and wish you were dead pain.

And one of the constant messages I have heard is that pain is the loudest voice you’ll ever hear.

It’s there, in the middle of the night, screaming at you that you’re unloved, that you’ve been rejected, that you’re all alone and nobody understands and nobody can help and this is the way it will always be and is as good as it’s going to get.

Those of us who have never really experienced this type of pain – and, thankfully, I am one of them – can conjure up all kinds of noble thoughts about dealing with pain. It’s easy to theorize about pain when it’s not my own. It becomes abstract, something to be endlessly discussed.

But those who endure this kind of pain know it is anything but abstract. It’s all-consuming, overwhelming, takes over all reality and looms like a dark shadow over every other thought.

The Bible talks a lot about pain. Job (30:17) says, “The night racks my bones, and the pain that gnaws me takes no rest.” Jeremiah 15:18 says, “Why is my pain unceasing, my wound incurable, refusing to be healed?”

King Hezekiah, a rare king of Israel who was described as following God and did “what was good and right and faithful before the Lord his God” (2 Chronicles 31:20), became sick to the point he was told he was going to die. In one of the most poignant descriptions of suffering, it says in 2 Kings 20 that Hezekiah “turned his face to the wall” and “wept bitterly.”

For all the encouragement and verses and platitudes that people who are hurting are told by loving, well-meaning friends and family, it is hard to hold rational, articulate opinions when you are curled up in the bed, or on the floor, or confined to a hospital room writhing in pain.

I am blessed to not have suffered like that myself, at least not for any extended period. So, I would never say to someone going through something like this, “I know how you feel.” I don’t know; I can’t know. I may take the pain I have felt and imagine what it would be like to multiply it by a hundred, by a thousand, but it’s not the same. I can’t really “know.”

The kind of pain that tells you that you have been forsaken – that’s the kind of pain Satan exploits. Someone I love very much, a person whose life reflects a faith and devotion to God far greater than my own, told me that in her worst pain, caused by an accident in which she probably should have died, she remembers hearing, “If God really loved you, he’d have taken you to heaven rather than leave you here to suffer like this.”

Of all the things that can turn a person from God, I wonder if pain is not Satan’s greatest weapon. I see that in the Cross, where the ultimate battle of God’s love vs. Satan’s evil was an unimaginable torture, where even the Son of God cried out “why have you forsaken me.”

I tend to think of Christians who suffer for God as those who are doing something that I consider significant for God’s kingdom: the martyrs, missionaries in foreign lands, those who are actively engaged every day in doing what we think of as “God’s work,’’ the noble stuff that we admire and share in sermons and Sunday School lessons.

But what if our idea of what is really “God’s work” is too limited?

My only explanation for pain, the only way I can begin to understand it, is to believe that there is something bigger going on than just what I believe to be my puny little life. The book of Job tells me that. There is some sort of cosmic, other-worldly battle between Satan, the Accuser, and God. Satan is, as the Bible tells us in multiple places, the “accuser” who stands before the throne accusing God’s people (Revelation 12:10, Zechariah 3:1-2 as examples). In Job, we learn that Satan says, “I can make people reject You” and God says, as he did of Job, “Do what you will (within the parameters I set) and let’s see who remains faithful.”

Does that conversation go on just about the ones we think of as righteous, like Job? And Paul and Peter and the martyrs? Or could it be about each of us, wherever we are in our faith?

I’m not entirely comfortable with that scenario. But I also understand that when those who are faithful praise and, as best they can, worship God in the midst of the most trying, mystifying, horrible circumstances, with the most excruciating pain - even when the rest of the world doesn’t know about it, when it seems from our perspective to serve no earthly purpose - Satan loses, again, and is forced to slink away in defeat.

When see friends suffering in pain they don’t seem to deserve, that there is no earthly reason for that I can see, I ask, “What in the world is going on here?” I may be missing the point, for what is going on “here” may not be of “this” world. Indeed, there is a good chance there is no “earthly” reason.

We’re called to live out our faith regardless, to be faithful, to trust. In return, we have the opportunity to be part of a great victory for God’s Glory, one in which that great cloud of witnesses’ shout in triumph while the Accuser, Satan, slinks away in defeat.

And pray we can cling to the promises of Scripture.

“Nothing in all of creation can separate us from the love of God.” Romans 8:39

“He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.” Revelation 21:4

“For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us.” – Romans 8:18

No pain. No gain.