Pain and Faith

I hate being nauseous. I mean, I really hate it. Throughout my life, whenever I’ve had that dreaded “uh oh, I think I’m going to throw up” feeling take over my body, an interesting thing happens. Regardless of the fact that, with all that is in me I desperately don’t want to get sick, and despite my irrational fear of the actual throwing up part, eventually I come to feel so miserable, that the fear is supplanted by acceptance, and I almost welcome the inevitable. In the moment when I’m finally sick, I experience a reprieve from the fear and pain. It’s an emotional event for me, heightened by relief to finally be done with that feeling of nausea, and come out on the other side of it.

Similarly, I love being alive. I mean, I really love it. My innate instinct to survive is strong and robust. Everything in my being desperately wants to stay here and be alive with the wonderful people in my life.

Thus far I’ve never been seriously ill, so it’s hard to imagine ever making peace with dying. Until I remember the whole throwing up thing. Do you think that’s what happens towards the end of an extended, terminal illness? Or serious accident/injury, when we’re in very dire straights? Do we just get so sick, and so tired and exhausted from fighting the inevitable, that we finally embrace the alternative?

It’s not that I’m afraid of the next life. I’m not. I have an unshakable conviction that the hereafter is real, and that it will absolutely be better than anything I’ve experienced here. This belief isn’t something anyone could prove or disprove, because it’s based on faith.

Up until the last couple years, I didn’t really have genuine faith. Real faith is powerful. It’s inexplicable to someone who hasn’t experienced it. The closest I can come to describing the difference between real faith, and what I used to think of as faith (but which was actually a combination of acceptance, belief, hope and logic) is like the difference between seeing lightening on tv, and having it strike the ground right before your eyes.

On the tv, you believe it’s power, accept that it’s real, don’t question it’s legitimacy, and can even ooh and ahhh at the beauty and strangeness of it. You can talk about it, thinking you know, and even describe it and declare your belief in the power of lightening to others. But when a bolt actually comes down out of the sky and strikes the ground right before your very eyes, coupled with that magnificent crack of thunder…well, you experience an entirely different kind of knowing.

In the process of my life experiences, some of which have been fairly challenging for me, (but then, whose aren't?), I’ve gone from thinking I had faith and knew what it was, to actually experiencing the power that true faith in Christ has to transform a life.

It’s a long process, and I’m (hopefully) just in the middle of it. But where I am right now is so vastly different from where I was a few short years ago that it's almost breathtaking. That whole “seeing through a glass darkly” thing is so apropos. It beautifully sums up the process of growing and learning in my life.

I recently wrote about fear. Upon reflection, I think the only part of my life that I struggle to not succumb to fear is in my ability to bear pain well. When there is a reason for it, pain is easier to endure…and I suppose moving on to the next life is a pretty solid reason. But I don’t really fear anything else.

Loss, trial, heartache…those are all par for the course in our sojourn here and I’m at peace with that. But when you are in physical pain, that’s a tough one. I hope whenever I’m called upon to endure physical discomfort and pain, I can do so with faith. I haven't always in the past, but I hope I've learned some things in the meantime. And I hope that in the process, I’ll be carried and sustained by the source of my faith, as I know I have been in the past.

I think that’s what happened when I was in labor with my two children. I recall the experience with Bunch. I had no pain relief during those 11 hours of labor except what little I took from being submersed in water, and I honestly feel like my soul retreated into some far away corner of my body. I didn't make a sound for hour upon hour, as the waves of pain overtook me. My eyes were opened to just how much a body could suffer. The experience was replicated with Gator, sans any relief being in water would have supplied (he was in distress and the water was nixed). In fact, my labor with Gator was even harder than the first time (though that seemed impossible during Bunch's birth).

I’d had injuries before in my life, but being in labor showed me clearly that there were things I never knew I never knew about pain. It was a crash course in humility. I distinctly remember telling Doc on the way home from the hospital after Bunch was born that we “couldn’t have any more children, because I simply couldn’t go through that kind of pain again.” And I was dead serious at that moment. It wasn’t idle conversation.

I was in awe that humanity had survived as long as it has, because why would any woman willingly go through that experience more than once? I was also humbled with a sense of gratitude for every female progenitor who had endured (and in some cases, died because of) childbirth, leading to my existence. And I remember feeling like I’d joined the ranks of a select club…Women Who’ve Experienced Drug-free Childbirth and lived to tell the tale. It was kind of empowering (even though I knew I could never go through it again.)

But funny, within a few short weeks, the intensity of the pain had diminished, and I was looking seriously forward to having another child. And I'm so glad that we did!

There’s probably a commensurate type of emotional pain, and I’m sure I’ll have to experience it too, someday. I think I’ve witnessed it in others enduring the grieving process and my heart goes out to them, but I have yet to lose anyone dearly beloved in my life so it's hard to tell for sure if it's the same. Part of me thinks that as long as I maintain a modicum of hope, emotional pain will be easier to endure. But I realize that could be a pipe dream.

I've always been amused when I go to the doctor and they have that little "pain chart", numbered 1-10.
"How bad is your pain?" the doctor asks.

How do I respond to that? Is their question based just on all the pain I've personally experienced (as if this would supply any kind of point of reference for them), or do they want me to include the realm of pain that I've only dared let myself imagine? Some tenth concentric ring of torturous hell reserved for those special last moments right before you succumb to blissful unconsciousness or death itself?

I ask, because even though I'm pretty tough, I know that the worst is probably yet to come. (I usually tell them "three or four...but I have a pretty high pain tolerance!", sighting my drug-free child births as an example. For the record, if I ever have another child, you can bet I'll be drinking whatever pain relief cocktail the doctors are serving. I don't need to be a hero any more.)

There are many hard lessons ahead that I’m sure I’ll "get" to learn. Emotional pain of loss and grief for certain. If I’m lucky enough to live a long time, that is. I hope I can endure them well.