Don’t ignore value of pain

Pain is a conundrum. You can’t live without it and you can’t live with it.

So what are you to do when you find yourself caught in the middle of an internal tug of war, ragging within your body, between experiencing normal pain and living with chronic pain? Author and best selling writer Dean Koontz said, “Pain can be endured and defeated only if it is embraced. Denied or feared, it grows.”

What a profound statement on so many levels with implications far reaching as the hands of time themselves.

The verdict is out. Pain is your friend and without properly understanding and embracing the gift of pain, you may become trapped in a frame of reference that convinces you to believe in a modern-day illusion capable of detaching you from the truth about pain and suffering. Then caught up in the illusion and Oz-like whirlwinds of distractions, your best friend suddenly is your worst enemy.

Instead of embracing pain for the purpose of enduring and defeating it, you avoid it and little by little it grows until what was supposed to heal you is now helping to destroy you.

It’s all because your environment, learned behaviors, attitudes, expectations and beliefs have preconditioned you to believe the processes of pain are not a necessary part of your life.

Are you thinking what I’m thinking right now? I mean pain is not pleasant, so if you don’t mind and it’s just the same with you, I’ll do my best to avoid it at all cost, right? This kind of thinking about pain could leave you paralyzed, disillusioned about your own right to exist and subject you to waking up every morning with another finger missing and wondering how your fingers keep disappearing in the middle of the night.

Dr. Paul Brand spent his entire medical carrier working with patients suffering from leprosy. When he was in India, one of his greatest difficulties was convincing his patients, who could feel no pain in their hands and feet, that their limbs still were a part of their body.

Try as he might, the patients had come to believe they had bad flesh and it was causing loss of limbs. They believed their flesh was being eaten alive by the disease.

Dr. Brand persevered and performed many surgeries, but patients still would come back with destroyed hands and feet.

Dr. Brand was convinced it was their direct involvement with their surrounding environment without the benefit of being able to experience or feel pain. He began making some progress with patients and put safety measures in place helping them avoid contact with their environment without protections. Special shoes were worn to protect their feet and many precautions were designed to avoid overusing their hands.

It worked very well, there was just one problem. No matter how they enforced safeguards, one particular group of men, still was losing fingers.

Dr. Brand was concerned. Until one young man noticed everyone in his dorm who was following the guidelines would be fine before bedtime, but upon waking in the morning they mysteriously would be missing fingers. Curiously, he stayed up all night to figure out what was happening while they slept.

In the middle of the night, he heard an unfamiliar sound and upon further investigation found rats gnawing at the fingers of his patients while they slept. They could feel absolutely nothing because of nerve damage from the disease. Their inability to feel pain provided their immediate environment a personal invitation to destroy them.

Upon the news, Dr. Brand matched each young man with a cat and suddenly all the young men who received surgery stopped losing fingers. Apparently, rats don’t like cats very much.

It’s difficult to relate to someone who feels no pain, but the real question is who would really want to be unable to feel pain? Pain truly is a gift. And by design, it does its job well, alerting the nervous system and brain something’s wrong at warp speed.

Pain doesn’t speak to the absence of design, rather it screams about the workings of a Designer. The Bible says, “We’re fearfully and wonderfully made.” Our ability to experience pain must remain part of our DNA.

What’s pain’s presence attempting to say about yourself? What are you doing to embrace pain’s message and cooperate with the doctor within you? What behaviors may be numbing your pain putting you at greater risk leaving you vulnerable, to be conditioned by your surrounding environment, without being able to feel the additional pain it’s inflicting.

What if normal pains in your body, you listen to, were designed to alert you to all kinds of rats wanting to eat your body alive? By ignoring normal pains and refusing to pay attention, they turn into chronic pains and left unchecked those pains eventually require you to become a cat owner as well.

I’m a dog kind of person and I would like to keep it that way, but maybe you could get used to the idea of having to sleep with a cat?