Last night I didn’t sleep at all, and I spent most of the day in pain. I don’t usually feel so much pain that I get nausea, but it happened today. Pain is a part of life. When a mother gives birth, she goes through pain in child birth and although the baby doesn’t feel pain in being born (at least I don’t think), the very act of child birth is painful. There’s not a single person who won’t, at one time or another in their lives, experience pain.
It is a way of the body communicating information. Yet, pain is uncomfortable and difficult. Some people don’t have to deal with much pain in their lives and then other must deal with it on a daily basis. It is one of those things that people automatically assign the idea that it is a bad thing. It is neither good nor bad. It just is. The reason most everyone assigns bad to it is because it is uncomfortable and hurtful.
I deal with pain on an almost daily basis. It is challenging and it is a struggle. However, I have come to realize that there’s more to it than just an uncomfortable feeling. Pain is my body’s way of communicating with me. I can fight against it and try my best to avoid pain or make the pain stop as soon as it starts, but that isn’t embracing life. Embracing life means trying my best to understand my body and how it works. There’s this huge difference even if it just sounds like semantics.
The problem with chronic pain is that when you don’t know how long the pain is going to last it hurts more because you can’t see the end to it. As I learn to deal with chronic pain conditions, I have learned to embrace the condition. I try to no longer worry about how long my headache with last or to worry how bad the pain is going to get. I know that I will be okay because God is by my side. My pain is something I can accept, and I know that I can take it for the next minute, then the next hour and then the next day. I live in the moment with my pain, and I try not to worry about the future.
On a day like today, I’m not sure if it works or not, but I know that I am going to be okay. I am going to endure this.
My faith saved me. May God’s peace reside in all of our hearts.
