Processing Pain

(via Pinterest)

There are days when it feels like the world is caving in on me. I do my best to breathe, but the air is scarce, and it isn't fresh. As it fills my lungs, I note the taste of artificiality; the stifling smell of something pretending to be what it is not. I choke and gag like I'm inhaling smoke, but everyone else around me seems to be fine; thriving, even. My condition worsens as I watch their happy, healthy faces. I want to scream, but I have not the energy such an outcry would take .... I may be taking poetic license to the extremes, but you get my point. It wasn't the best of days.

I found myself pathetically trying to cradle both my head and my hands, to somehow ease the pain that emanated from them, making them throb. I winced, and tried to move on, willing the medicine I took to just work already. It didn't. I did what any good Christian would in the same place, grabbing my Bible as fast as possible. Only I didn't. I cried, got cranky, cleaned things, said nasty words of self-destruction to the mirror, said less than Christ-like things to my family members, and I even growled at one point. It isn't a pretty picture, I know. This is how I process pain on my own. This is what I revert to when the day is long, my body aches, the list of chores seems endless, my texts go unanswered like my questions, the stress piles on, and I leave my Bible where it lays. It was that simple.

By the time I picked up that Book, my vision was almost irreparably impaired. I read, "Bless The Lord, o my soul" as "Blah blah blah, o my blah." This is not a translation of the Bible that I would recommend. I was basically holding my ears and going, "na-na-na, I'm not listening!" and then getting upset that He wasn't speaking to me. Have you noticed yet that I have problems?

This passage that I read, I heard a pastor talk about it once, well, about the line that's also in a pretty popular song: "Bless The Lord, o my soul." I can't give you an exact quote, but it was something along the lines of this: we are actually saying to our souls, "Bless Him!!" We have to actually tell our souls (ourselves) that, because really, the general human instinct isn't to bless Him ... especially not on the bad days. As the sinful, flawed beings we are, our first response to pain is to curse Him; to make His heart break. That was me today. I did that. I can take sole blame for those actions. And yet, He blessed me. I saw someone I didn't expect to see, and as she gave me a super big (and very needed) hug, I could hear Him whispering in my ear, "I did that."

My point is this: a day in my hands ... falls apart in ways that I can't even wrap my head around. A day placed in God's hands ... gets mended in ways that I didn't even think were broken.