Sometimes you just have to sit with your pain before you can release it.
-- Anonymous

This pain and its frustrations won’t go away. You’ve lived with them for a long time. At times, you wear your pain like a broach over the heart or use it as a shield blocking anything, good and bad, from entering or penetrating your soul. You’ve given the pain arms, legs, and a brain, and even wear it like an old tattered robe – it covers, but it also exposes you to the elements and questioning eyes. You hate the pain, hate the way it makes you feel, hate its control over your life, but you live with it anyway.

To get rid of it, you’ve got to look at it and feel it. Sit with it.

Okay, yeah, it’s hard to just sit with pain. If it wasn’t, it wouldn’t exist and we wouldn’t be having this discourse, right? The pain hurts and it’s ugly, so we run from it. We run and deny it, giving time and attention instead to issues and situations that purposely distract and distance us from the pain, our Selves, and any other thing that brings us discomfort.

But you can only do that for so long and you either examine the core of the pain, or you find your Self succumbing to habits and behaviors that take your conscious mind to another place, a place that numbs the affects of pain and its consequences. Alcohol, drugs, work, whatever the vice, you’re looking for something to freeze and dull the pain, if only temporarily. Or, maybe you find yourself trying to fill the voids and emptiness left by pain, and sex or the security of a relationship have become the bandages you repeatedly misuse to cover up, pour in the gaps and holes, and hide you from your pain. But when unsettled pain erupts and surfaces like blood from a fresh cut, reminding you of its existence, it not only knocks the wind from you, it also takes your partner(s) down with you. Like truth, pain crushed to earth, rises again and again, and it doesn’t stop until it is examined and resolved.

Thus, it takes courage, self-will, and Jesus to sit with your pain, open it up, look it in the eye, pull it apart piece by piece, and thoughtfully and lovingly put every discovery in its proper place, no matter how long it takes or how badly it hurts. Intentionally sitting with your pain gives you pause and room for reflection, and it’s in that quiet space that you hear God giving you answers to the lingering prayers of your heart, salve to relieve your hurts, and divine healing from all that troubles you.

Sit with your pain. There’s no other way to get it out of your life. The more you sit with it, the smaller it gets, and eventually, you’ll be able to blow it away.

Sadiqqa © 2007