Category: rascals and strugglers

Facing Down Your Dragon

“For I am ready to fall,
    and my pain is ever before me.”

Psalm 38:17

Over 85 million Americans live in chronic pain. That’s amazing. Maybe you’re one of them and maybe you just want to understand — perhaps you have a friend or family member who is hurting. They’re facing their dragon and that can be a challenge.

Pain can be constant, or, it can be intermittent. It shows up unpredictably. One never knows when. But believe me, it is terribly real, even if it’s not continual. I look at my dragon in the eye far too often. Way too often.

There are different kinds and various levels to it. Healthcare people often use the Numerical Rating Scale (NRS). Pain is ranked by numbers between 1-10, the higher the number the greater the pain.

Christians are part of that 85 million. We’re not immune just because we believe in Jesus. Some of us will hurt.

Coping with Chronic Pain

  • Learn all you can about your particular issue. I’m constantly looking and hopefully learning all I can, I want to be an expert. Research things. Google and Wikipedia can be deep reservoirs of knowledge.
  • Learn how to worship and pray in a brand new way. Things have changed now and seeking Him becomes a challenge, and, it can be easier.
  • Insomnia
  • Depression or anxiety, or both.
  • Fatigue, or stress.
  • Mood swings.
  • Doctors and meds.

Advice to Caregivers

I have to warn you, severe pain can make your dear one irrational. Pain can get so intense that you will find it impossible to relate to the sufferer. I once had a fierce battle with Complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS) in both forearms. Most doctors rate this as one of the worst types of pain to have.

Morphine didn’t help. Lynnie (my wife) could only watch and pray as the dragon kept attacking me, over and over. She watched me writhe in pain and she was pretty much helpless.

I was very angry, wildly rude and terribly mean. I was frustrated because I couldn’t communicate how bad the pain was. Over and over I tried to share how I was feeling, but words were not enough.

Some advance the idea that you need to find enough faith to be healed, but what about having enough faith to live in constant pain?

“Pain is no evil, unless it conquers us.”

     Charles Kingsley

He’s Just a Stone’s Throw Away

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“And He withdrew from them about a stone’s throw, and He knelt down and began to pray,”

Luke 22:41

WHO KNOWS WHAT JESUS IS THINKING AT THIS PRECISE MOMENT as he entered the Garden? His disciples waited for Jesus and scripture states that he proceeded ahead of them to find some needed strength through prayer— this verse tells us he went “a stone’s throw.”

We often share in the sorrows of the people closest to us, and Jesus wants His disciples to follow him. And they do, but not all the way. They came close, but were oblivious to the full nature of the pain that was beginning for Jesus. They slept while he agonized.

He was for the first time perhaps, needing someone close.

Many of us will make the same trip to the garden. Soon every believer makes the trip to ‘Gethsemane,’ but not as mere observers. It is a distinct place of testing and of sorrow. And each will experience it for themselves. “The servant is not above his master.”

But Jesus is close— he completely understands what it means to be alone with sorrow. The believer can lean on Jesus as the pain continues. He sends his “Comforter” to each, as he escorts us through this time. He comes in grace, and is completely kind.

He is truly just a stone’s throw away.

“God is our refuge and strength,
 always ready to help in times of trouble.”

Psalm 46:1

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He Shows Me Paradise

“Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths.

8 And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden. 9 But the Lord God called to the man and said to him, “Where are you? 10 And he said, “I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid myself.”

Genesis 3:7-10, ESV 

When God walked through the Garden, He was looking to find Adam and Eve somewhere. He was searching for them, and I don’t know why, was He wanting their fellowship? Who can say. They both found themselves resisting God.

The garden was the place where Adam lived. 

And it was where God was looking, and where the both were now hiding. This shattered this entire world. Man became estranged from God. The friendship was broken, and all Adam and Eve knew was their nakedness. And they understood the shame of sin, and they hid.

The Hebrew word for garden is “pardes,” which means orchard, or garden.

Interestingly, it’s also the word the Hebrews used for studying the Torah. They believe that the proper study of God’s words led them back into God’s garden, and the insight that they received from God’s Word would take them back to the orchard of Eden.

I’ve learned that my sincere desire to read the Bible can become something quite less than stellar.  When it does happen it takes me into spiritual truth, and I discover an intimacy with God that I could never conjure up on my own. I’ve received something from the Father who walks in His garden, and is waiting for me.

The study of scripture is not really hard when the Holy Spirit happens.

I have 15 Bibles in my bookcase. Yet sometimes I never understand a passage that changes me. When it does, it’s not as often as I like. I marvel at this wonder of God talking to me. I also suspect that the contact comes when I walk into His garden, and receive the insight He can give me.

Can you step into God’s Word and then truly understand it, And yet we do it’s like walking with Him (in the cool of the day). The garden calls out to me, but regrettably, my heart and mind never really “walks” with  God. I read the Word but seldom understand it, and spiritually, I’m not much to look at.

Paredes, is the Hebrew word for the garden, and for fellowship, it’s the place of communion with His Word, and then discovering those bright moments when He comes. It does happen, and yet I truly fail to understand. Yet those specially times, reading the Word becomes a joy because God is now teaching me. 

When I start to see scripture on fire, I know He has ignited it.

Blessings to you!

My Scapegoat

“And Aaron shall lay both his hands on the head of the live goat, and confess over it all the iniquities of the people of Israel, and all their transgressions, all their sins. And he shall put them on the head of the goat and send it away into the wilderness by the hand of a man who is in readiness.”

Leviticus 16:21

The ritual was profoundly simple. Every year two goats were brought into the Temple. Goat #1 was sacrificed for the sins of the high priest. Goat #2 was not killed, but became the “scapegoat.” The priest would lay his hands on its head, and the nation’s sins would be transmitted and then carried to the desert.

This ritual finds fulfillment in Jesus Christ, for He absorbs our sin and carries it away.

Scripture is clear on this. Maybe this might help. Back in the 1970s I remember sponges printed with a politician’s advertising his platform/promises. At first the sponge was paper thin. But when you added water it expanded into a full-size sponge.

For some weird reason that communicates what happened at the cross. Jesus received my sin, darkness, and iniquity. He absorbed it all, and I’m free. He is my scapegoat. He carries all of my dark darkness.

“Surely He has borne our griefs (sicknesses, weaknesses, and distresses) and carried our sorrows pains [of punishment], yet we [ignorantly] considered Him stricken, smitten, and afflicted by God [as if with leprosy].”

Isaiah 53:4, Amplified