The Power of Pain

THE POWER OF PAIN

"Pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our consciences, but shouts in our pains. It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world."

-C.S. Lewis

I just got done reading a chapter out of the ‘Voyage of the Dawn Treader’ in which Eustace encounters Aslan for the first time. Unfortunately for Eustace, and awesome for us, is that he is in the form of a dragon and must remove his scales in order to step into the well that Aslan has commanded him into.

He tries multiple times to painfully rip the scales from his body, and seemingly succeeds. Yet the dry, painful scales always return regardless of Eustace’s efforts. Aslan calmly informs Eustace that the job to remove the scales belongs to Him and Him alone. And O, how painful it is, but how pleasurable to see the transformation that is birthed form submitting to Aslan. (It always gives me the willies when Eustace compares this to the satisfying yet painful feeling of picking a scab.)

The pain Aslan unleashes upon this dragon leads to something magnificent: The rebirth of Eustace Scrubb. Our culture often will examine pain in any form and reject it as a contradiction to the will of our Father. But we need to have a bigger concept of God that includes pain as a weapon waiting to be used in God’s arsenal.

One option is to say that God has no hand in pain whatsoever, which believe it or not, happens to be a new up-and-rising theology that is gaining some serious momentum. Or we can resolve to know that God is sovereign and really does exert pain upon his children for glorious purposes.

Pain is a powerful tool that God wields with magnificent transformative abilities. It is pain that we need sometimes to finally tear the scales from our souls that we have acquired through our failures and mess-ups in life. Without pain, we would still remain dragons lumbering around in a lonely existence unable to progress as individuals into the image of God.

Thus we must always embrace the pain that we encounter in life, knowing that we can either waste the pain and stay the same, or grit our teeth and see trials to the end to discover that we have endured the lovingly, painful claws of Aslan and have arrived on the other end as a new boy indeed.

James 1:3-4 Consider it a great joy, my brothers, whenever you experience various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance. But endurance must do its complete work, so that you may be mature and complete, lacking nothing.