home | contact

Message from Pastor Marty

Pain

By Pastor Peter W. Marty

Every time our congregation gathers together, there is something invisible in the room. You cannot feel it. You cannot hear it. You cannot see it, though sometimes you may glimpse its shadow on the face of someone trying to mask it with a smile. I’m speaking of pain — physical and emotional pain that is part of every life. Every one of us must reckon with it at some point in time; sometimes as a permanent part of our existence.

If I get tempted to zero in too selfishly on some bodily pain I may be facing on a given day, all I have to do is imagine an early 19th-century soul getting worked on in a dentist chair — pre-Novocain. That is indescribable. Or, I think of John and Abigail Adams’ daughter undergoing a mastectomy on their dining room table — without anesthesia — and all of the pain in that room besides just her horrific surgical pain.

Pain is a lot more complicated than we tend to assume. Like beauty, there are no standard international units of measurement to define it easily. No objective units of heat or light, pressure or frequency, can be applied logically to pain. Wise medical practitioners seem to have the best definition: “Pain is what the patient says it is.”

One of our congregational members pulled a little vial from his pocket last week. Inside was the 7/8-inch-long toothpick point that emergency room personnel had extracted from the ball of his foot. Tom stepped with his bare foot on a toothpick from a cake his wife had just baked. I trust him when he says he screamed. Had he been running for his life from a knife-wielding murderer, and stepped on the same toothpick, it’s doubtful he would have even felt the pain. Such is the complexity of the signals that our nerve cells send to our brain.

I’ve been reading from a painfully heavy book recently. It’s a dazzling compendium of the history of pain, written by Thomas Dormandy, a retired chemical pathologist. For almost 600 pages, he covers nearly everything you ever wanted to know about pain, and a few things you didn’t. There are some pains that never made it into his narrative… like:

The pain of being judged by the color of your skin. An African-American male in my Kansas City congregation, a well-placed community leader, used to describe getting pulled over by the Mission Hills police every time he chose to drive through that affluent white community on his way home. It made him so sad and so angry.

The pain of being made fun of on a playground … Or not getting picked for a team. Maybe you were fortunate to escape those pains. Most people are not.

The pain of having to choose whether to buy food for your three kids or pay the rent. It happens every day in America, in every town. Would that we knew how slim the spread is for those who opt against eviction.

The pain of being 16 and not liking the way you look. Or being 36 or 56 and feeling just as insecure about your appearance.

The pain of that mother who wrote to Newsweek magazine early in the Iraq War, just to say: “The president told them to ‘Bring It On,’ and that’s why I don’t have a son anymore.”

The pain of grieving for that parent who never found a way to say, “I love you.” I used to think love was so easy to utter. How could one ever miss speaking it? I guess love has to be taught, or learned, or practiced if it is ever to be spoken.

The pain of lost years for the innocent person wrongly incarcerated. How do you ever retrieve life that someone else has taken away for three decades?

The pain of realizing that you have hurt another person by your words or actions. Oooh, that one really hurts. A “9” on a scale of “10”?

My list is getting too long. So, before I lay more pain on you, join me in praying to our Lord for strength through pain, and for trust to know that God will not leave us alone in our suffering. Amen.

Pastor Peter W. Marty,

  ::