Sometimes pain is how God gets our attention. When we’re hurt, he can teach us more than he can when we’re happy.
When I wonder about that, I notice how it works for my children. A pinched finger hurts, and they remember to be more careful next time. Something like a bee sting really gets their attention. Not only do they make wide detours around places where bees and wasps might lurk, but they also learn empathy through the deal. When a sibling or friend is stung, they know the experience is painful, and they can sympathize. Misbehavior that brings certain and unpleasant consequences will not be so readily repeated. Pain is God’s megaphone, observed C. S. Lewis: “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”3
Verse 18 of today’s Scripture is a plea to God to remember us when we’re hurting: “Look upon mine affliction and my pain.”
When life hurts, we want God to remember us. We want some acknowledgment that he sees what we’re going through. But mostly we want him to notice our pain and take it away. We want him to remove the mountains we don’t want to climb, those mountains that hurt our feet so much. Yet often it is only when we climb those mountains that we can look back down into the valley and see what we learned in the wearying climb.
So pain serves a great purpose in God’s plan for my life. I don’t always like it, but when I remember to look deeper to find what it might be teaching me, I am occasionally surprised. Even in a pleasant way.
If pain is the way God gets my attention, I accept it. Not always willingly, it is true, but a measure of acceptance brings a measure of peace.
Isaiah 24:15 goes still one step further. The prophet says, “Glorify ye the LORD in the fires.”
The only way to do this, I find, is by believing the fires, or trials, in my life are for a reason. Perhaps only God really understands that reason now, but if I accept it patiently—and maybe even if I don’t—he will use the bad to teach me many necessary things I would not learn otherwise. And God will comfort me through the grief and difficult times.
| Prayer | Reflection |
| Lord, when the fires come into my life, I will try to praise you anyway. Even when I can’t understand the reason or see the results, peace comes when I trust that you know what is happening and why it must be. | What is one good thing I have learned from pain? |