I hesitate to write this for two reasons.
First I have merely glimpsed darkness and I don’t want to suggest I know much about it at all. By reflecting on my experience I am not co-opting the experience of someone who lives with disability or longterm pain. That is something I know nothing about. People who live with chronic pain, invisible sufferers, are (in my opinion) battle hardened warriors in a struggle against nature’s brokenness. They’re truly worth listening to.
The second reason I hesitate to write is simply this, words fail. Just as one cannot, with words, relay the sweetness of honey - for it must be tasted - so one cannot convey God’s goodness or share spiritual experiences adequately with words. For this reason the psalmist implores ‘Oh taste and see that Yahweh is good!’
Despite these things I want to try, like an explorer, to explore something of what I’ve learnt about pain recently.
___
For the past year I have had a pain in my leg resulting from a trapped sciatic nerve that, for the past six months has become acute and for the past three months has left me unable to walk anywhere, or to stand for longer than a few minutes. My world has shrunk to wherever I can find a chair and so I hobble between chairs or I carry a chair with me at all times! Sometimes the pain is sharp, an eight or nine out of ten, at other times it’s a one or a two but it’s always there and, like having a tooth ache in my leg, it’s hard to ignore.
Sitting helps relive the pain but then I get a numb bum and need to stretch or stand, which only results in me needing to sit down again but then the numbness (and physical boredom) from sitting comes back straight away. It’s an annoying little cycle. If I decide to to ‘power on through’ and become determined to walk further than a hundred yards the aggravation becomes so intense that I feel I need to find a chair, like I need to breathe and sometimes when I sit, I just cry.
The thought of having to walk somewhere (say from the car park to the shop) brings on a palpable anxiety and waking up each day to be met by an all too familiar ache in my leg can been quite depressing. Needless to say that I can’t do much but I can eat and drink which, when you can’t exercise, makes the problem worse!
I’ve learnt that physical pain is not just physically tiring but mentally and emotionally draining as well. Before I was given compassionate leave I became a frazzled mess. It’s just my body that’s in pain I thought there’s no reason why mind or spirit need to be so affected! Not true. Turns out we are a neatly knitted body-soul after all!
Here’s three observations from the past few months I’d like to share:
1. Everyone has advice.
I mean everyone has advice. “Have you tried…” or “let me give you this person’s number, they’ll help.” or “you should do this…” or “what you need to do is…” a lot of the time I'm genuinely grateful that someone would take the time to care enough to share some helpful advice. In what I'm saying I'm not undermining any of that, truly. If you've given me advice int he past year or tried to help - thank you! It's just receiving dozens of pieces of advice and the same reaction from people over and over teaches you a thing or two about people and pain.
What I've learnt is that there’s nothing like someone in pain to call forth our inner saviour complex. I don’t mean that in a mean way, we all want to help each other. But whenever I share my discomfort with someone sometimes they react as though they’ve just seen Batman’s searchlight in the sky. “I will fix you! I will be the hero you’ve been looking for!” and out tumbles the latest bit of advice. Usually it comes from a desire to help although sometimes I get the impression that the advice was a way of them removing their discomfort at my situation!).
People want to help people, people want to be helpful, and people don’t like seeing other people in pain. It’s a lovely instinct and impulse but, on the other hand, it can be a pain! For the person who asks me how I'm doing, for them it’s the first time they’ve heard me talk about it that day, but for me it’s probably the fifth or tenth or one hundredth time that day! Honestly I've become bored of hearing myself talk about it all the time, and that only compounds the actual pain and feel.
I can’t speak for everyone who lives with pain but what I find to be far better than advice, and of far more genuine help is simply: sympathy and silence.
Depending on how well you know someone, the expression of concern and the entering into their discomfort by holding the moment in silence is more meaningful and healing than any piece of advice you might be able to give.
Silence and sympathy is also helpful since it assumes that the suffering person isn’t stupid. When you try and solve them (like a puzzle) you are inadvertently suggesting that they're not clever enough to have thought of whatever it is that you’re about to suggest!
In the past year I’ve tried herbal remedies (seriously, natural health food shops are criminally expensive!), acupuncture, shock therapy, hanging from a scaffold pole(!), physiotherapy, full body massage and regular sea swims in the middle of January! None of it has helped me not really.
Having said the above, if you do know someone reasonably well and have journeyed with them for sometime or are an expert in some field then please by all means - suggest away! What I’ve written is a general truth for people, not a universal one.
2. Prayer can be a pain.
This may come as something of a shock to hear a Christian pastor say, and so allow me to explain what I mean.
Living as part of a Christian community is a huge privilege. On an average week I would often relate to more than twenty people that I consider to be close relations. We share our lives together, offer practical assistance to one another and, on top of all that, the Spirit in us makes our fraternity an experiential reality as well. This is a delight and I count myself truly blessed to be in a church household-family like this.
A weapon in every Christian’s arsenal when hoping to alleviate suffering is of course prayer. Prayer is powerful. Not only have I witnessed numerous miraculous healings over the years, I experience daily the thrill of intimate connection, inner peace and God’s presence through prayer. Offering to pray for someone is an important way that a Christian deploys their full concern for someone. And yet herein lies the dilemma.
To pray for someone is to show them concern and it invites God to alter their situation in an instant, meaning that for many Christians to not offer to pray for someone can leave them with feelings of disobedience and faithlessness. How many times have we walked away from someone saying to ourselves 'I should have offered to pray for them!'
I offer to pray for people when I can, I still will. Except that, having been through what I'm going through I’ll likely take a slightly different approach now.
In the past few months I have had more people take time to pray for me than perhaps I've had in all my previous years as a Christian to date. At one particular conference for Christian leaders I think I had fifteen separate offers of prayer in two days! I’ve had people take thirty seconds and offer up ‘arrow’ prayers for me, and I've had people take twenty minutes to lovingly bring me to God patiently and thoughtfully. Some prayers have left me feeling slightly worse off than before (like when people get annoyed that I’m not healed!), but most prayers have left me with a sense of having been known and cared for.
Here’s what I’ve learnt through it all: It’s tiring.
When you’re living with pain, it’s tiring to keep being prayed for. Before a person prays I’m generally ‘ok’. I’m in pain, but I’m at peace. I’ve been walking with God and talking to God about my own pain long before someone offers to pray for me. Then what happens when they pray for me is that I’m unsettled out of this place of peace and brought into a land of possibility. 'Possibly land' is an unstable place. Will God heal me, won't he?
Then, after a person has prayed for me and when I don’t sense God’s presence or experience him healing me I am ripped out of the land of possibility into an awareness of disappointment. I suddenly have to try and be a pastor to the person who's been praying. I feel bad for them that I haven’t been healed and I want to do what I can to reassure them so that they're not left feeling bad. I might say ‘it feels slightly better’ (when it does) or sometimes ‘maybe I’ll wake up tomorrow feeling better’ (because maybe I will). I need to deploy the right response for the moment in order to move past the disappointment (on both sides) over the lack of healing.
The dynamics of miraculous healing and the Christian life is a complex one. Many times in my life I’ve wished that the possibility of healing wasn’t a possibility at all since it would remove a lot of the heartache that surrounds this mysterious subject. However when God does heal someone miraculously it's always such a blessing to the individual concerned that I realise how deficient we'd be without it and how beautiful and precious God’s gifts of healing truly are.
As a side note, can we stop talking about 'unanswered prayer'? Seriously, it's really odd. God never leaves prayers unanswered, he simply says 'no' sometimes or even 'wait'. He's a person, a loving Father even, and so we must come to trust his will and his decision even when it hurts us. Rant over.
From now on I’ll take the following approach. Rather than assuming an individual wants me to pray for their healing I’ll simply ask them a question, like Jesus often would: ‘how can I pray for you?’ or ‘how can I help?’ This both dignifies the sufferer and acknowledges the fatiguing experience of being prayed for so regularly.
Another question I might ask is ‘what is God saying to you about your situation?’ since he undoubtedly is saying something. As much as I would have loved to not be in pain these past months, I’ve known God in and through it. I also believe, along with St. Paul that ‘when I am weak, then I am strong’ and that I should 'boast’ in my weakness in order that the ‘power of Christ may rest on me.’ Honestly church, do we believe this? I’m not sure the word of faith or health and wealth (heretical) movement do.
We so often seem to glorify physical strength and health as much as the world around us does, forgetting that our God became poor and became weak that he might make many rich and strong. Weakness and suffering is God’s preferred tool for creating remarkable things in the world. Let's not forget this.
A darker thought lurks behind many of these insights that truly frightens me: are churches like mine even safe or healthy places for disability any more? That’s an idea to reflect on another time perhaps.
3. God is closer than I knew.
Lastly I have seen something else in this time. God is near. I don’t know how to relay this properly (words fail) but I can genuinely say that being plunged into weakness and pain has brought with it a deeper and fuller sense of God’s presence than I’ve known before.
In one memorable occasion when I was sat at my desk in prayer I simply whispered to God “I’ll keep the pain if it means I don’t have to lose this.” and I meant it. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not been all hymns and homilies. There have been plenty of moments of just pain, pain and more pain. But then even then, the pain hasn't been soul deep.
When God draws near we’re not overwhelmed by some ‘vague and nameless power’ but we are brought face to face with a person. This has been the experience of many people through the years and it’s been mine as well; it’s like having your best friend, your father and your spouse with you sitting, listening, looking and holding. I love him and I’ve loved just sitting and staring at him with my mind’s eye as he has stared at me in return.
Honestly it’s been overwhelming at times and has been helpful for recalibrating life’s purpose. It reminded me of something a friend once shared about an experience he had. My friend had preached a sermon on joy and afterwards was approached by a disabled church member. The individual had a terminal disease and as the disease had progressed they'd become wheelchair bound and barely able to speak. They beckoned my friend closer and then whispered in his ear “the light shines brightest in the dark.”
The light shines brightest in the dark.
The light shines brightest in the dark.
The light shines brightest in the dark.
For this reason we need not fear the dark whether of disaster, disease or death. “Even the darkness is not dark to you” writes the psalmist. If that is so, why would we fear it? This was also my experience when my dear dad died in 2010. When the moment I'd dreaded for so long came, God was there. In a dozen small ways he drew nearer to me then than he had before. He's often found easiest in the dark.
We get a few short decades on earth. Our lives are short, sometimes desperately so and Christianity isn’t a pill to escape the darkness but the news that God will not abandon us in it. In fact it’s more than he will not ‘abandon’ us in it it’s actually the good news that he’s especially close to us in it!
You see God when he became a man chose not to live in the brightest and shiniest and most impressive parts of his society. He identified not with the rich but with the poor and he ate not with saints but with sinners. More than that he named not the victors but the victims as his special friends and he put himself forward as a candidate to suffer injustice. It's as though he was drawn to it.
God is near to the brokenhearted, the mourning and the poor in spirit. If we believed this it would affect the way we offer advice and prayer. If we believed this we’d consider some sufferers truly ‘blessed’ indeed and we’d aim to strip ourselves of anything that would prevent us from knowing Christ for more fully.
I loved my health and hope it returns soon. I can’t wait to get back to running again or walking over the hills or just strolling to the shop to buy milk or to the school gate to collect the kids. I’m expectant and hopeful for those days to return soon but until they do I’m happy with him who my soul loves.
When darkness comes it’s my prayer that you too see the light. After all 'a light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it'.