It’s laughing with your friend at a time when you shouldn’t. It’s the sweat in your palms wanting to know someone you see and the pit in your stomach when they actually see you. It’s being touched by hands that aren’t your own. It’s the thrill of an escape that almost wasn’t. It’s the embarrassment you feel, naked for the first time. It’s helping a friend find something they lost. It’s a smile, a joke, a song. It’s what someone does that they like doing. It’s what someone does that they like remembering. It’s the thinking of things you may never do and the doing of things you may never have thought. It’s the road ahead and the road behind. It’s the first step and the last and every one in between, because they all make up the good life.
··· Tags pointing to: pain ···
A Little Motivation
Pain doesn’t tell you when you ought to stop. Pain is the little voice in your head that tries to hold you back because it knows if you continue, you will change. Don’t let it stop you from being who you can be. Exhaustion tells you when you ought to stop. You only reach your limit when you can go no further.
If we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it.
Grief Work
“Grief work” [is] holding the mystery of pain and looking right at it and learning deeply from it.
Truly, it is in the darkness that one finds the light, so when we are in sorrow, then this light is nearest of all to us.
In the final analysis, the questions of why bad things happen to good people transmutes itself into some very different questions, no longer asking why something happened, but asking how we will respond, what we intend to do now that it happened.
I am certain everything is gift.
I am certain we are entitled to nothing.
I am certain the wells for pain and joy are not separate.
I am certain bitterness and healing are a choice.
I am certain that running from your darkness leads to greater darkness.
I am certain the darkness is held ultimately by light.
I am certain that the words from scripture “In Him we live and move and have our being” are not poetic, they are actual physical reality.
When we become aware that we do not have to escape our pains, but that we can mobilize them into a common search for life, those very pains are transformed from expressions of despair into signs of hope.
All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful.
Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after all you don’t know what work these conditions are doing inside you?