The Gift of Pain

I was trying to leg out an infield hit. I stretched to the bag and felt a little pop and realized I had popped my quad muscle. I limped back to the dugout and realized I was done. Two days later, feeling I was recovered enough from my quad, I tried to hit. As a power hitter, when I swing it is all parts of the body working in forward motion. On a 3-1 count, I let her rip and went down. Done for the evening again. Two days later, I am back at it again trying to catch and while stretching right to catch a ball out of the strike zone I did it again.

After three re-occurrences of the same image, it finally sunk into my thick skull that maybe I ought to lay low for a while and let my injury actually heal. So I did or so I thought. I was putting spaghetti away and I dropped a container of spaghetti on the floor. As I was going to pick it up, I felt the most intense pain in the leg to date and I dropped to the floor in agony. This pain caught me by surprise.

Author Philip Yancey has written extensively about the subject of pain. He co-wrote a book called The Gift of Pain and has referred to it in multiple of his books. Leprosy patients are at great risk of doing harm to themselves because they can feel no pain. Someone with leprosy can stick their hand in a fire and not know it. The book makes the fascinating conclusion that pain is actually good for us. Pain is much broader than physical. It reaches to the very core of our being. Some of the worst pain is emotional and spiritual.

Intentional Pain Stops Us from Unintended Consequences
If there were no consequences to our behavior, we would do all sorts of bad things. But the bad things we do leave a mark. My continued insistence on playing through pain only made my situation worse. We can see this with our dabbling with sin. There are always consequences and the mark of pain helps us to recognize it.

Unintentional Pain Reveals Our Need for God
Some of the worst pain comes from outside. It is the consequences of living in a fallen world. My worst pain on my example came from the accidental spill of the spaghetti. Likewise, the unforeseen such as an accident or a trial occurs. This type of trial leads us to recognize our frailty and our need for a personal God.