The Hidden Profit of Pain

Ten months after resigning, my journal records:

” Today I feel at peace and rest. I notice I no longer feel tired. I am ready to rediscover my faith from the vantage point of no longer needing to strive, to impress.

Something Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 11 &12 strikes me. He speaks of being untrained in speech (11:6), of being content with weakness and difficulties (12:10), that he is not inferior to the most eminent apostles ‘even though I am nothing’.

And then that list of suffering and weaknesses that punctuates the final verses of chapter 11 and is climaxed in his attitude to those afflictions in 12:9-10.

How enamoured we are with those whose lives are successful and without seeming difficulty. And how much we despise weakness, suffering, loss, difficulty. Our aim is to avoid such things at almost any cost.

I’d never read 2nd Corinthians 12 before with the insight I now have. I had skimmed over the elements of Paul’s trials partly because I had not been so bereft in spirit so as to pause and read it slowly…to feel the disappointment, loss and perplexity of this God appointed man of Christ.

Paul is not as embarrassed and image conscious as I. He sees the hidden profit of pain (12:10)

John Bunyan, wrenched from his family and imprisoned, wrote:

‘ I never had in all my life so great an inlet to the word of God as now [in prison].

The scriptures that I saw nothing in before are made, in this place, to shine upon me. Jesus Christ was never more real or apparent than now.

I have seen such things here that, I am persuaded, I shall never while in this world be able to express.’

There is freedom in the company of Bible contributors who, by their letter’s nurture us in our pain and uncertainty. Their words help us grasp the reality that pain is historical and universal. It is the conduit to understanding our frailty and need for Christ’s presence and help.