In the Face of Pain

Facing pain is not an easy thing. It is not fun, it does not happen or pass easily. It lingers in the back of your mind.

“Could I have done something better?”

“What else could I have said?”

When you’re in a position where you can influence what happens in someone else’s life, half the time your prayer is simply “let me not screw up”.

Life is messy. It has tangles and knots and mats, like my hair used to get when I wouldn’t brush it. If you ignore it, it snarls and gets angry.

I desperately want to help people, especially the people that have been put under my umbrella for right now. I want to make things better, to fix. Simply and plainly, I don’t want there to be hurt. I want everybody’s life to be sunshine and rainbows and ponies and puppies.

But it isn’t. Grey clouds come. Thunderstorms roll in. Dramatic music plays.

(OK, maybe not the dramatic music).

But you get the picture. The pain follows the beauty and amazement.

In the wake of this pain, there is little to do but be present, pray, listen and ask questions, and pray some more. There is little to be said aside from sitting with the person, feeling with and for them. And sometimes, you simply have to stand alone and face the crashing waves.

These are truths that I became familiar with in Uganda, and that I am aware of in life and my job today. No matter what continent you are on, darkness follows you. This is a fallen world, after all.

And yet we know that the darkness does not have the final word. God’s mercies are new every morning. Hope and change and fresh growth follow the storm as surely as a sunrise, with all of the beauty and splendor of a sunrise over an ocean.