Humility in Pain

My posts have been less frequent lately, because I’ve not been feeling so well. The migraines have been ratcheting up and not completely subsiding in between, leaving me with significant pain every day. I hate not posting regularly. It’s a discipline I have come to treasure. But in this Advent, I have continued to meditate on humility, even in my time off-line.

Pain is a great teacher of humility, and chronic pain is a live-in tutor. It has a way of grinding down my illusions about myself. In periods when I have felt relatively well, I have considered myself to be patient, attractive, and generous. When I am in significant pain for a long period of time, my illusions of personality wear down like the seat of my old jeans, to something threadbare and embarrassingly transparent. I begin show those parts of myself that are impatient, querulous, and selfish. It feels like lifting a hundred pounds with one arm, to reach out to other people when that pain, even if it’s not excruciating, eats at me day after day.

When pain causes me to see myself that way, it scares me, too. I don’t like the truth. I often don’t like myself. Often I’ll withdraw from others. I’m afraid I’ll snap at them, or that they’ll see the unattractive, unfriendly, grouchy me and not like me, either. The isolation just makes me more miserable. The tension builds, and so does the pain. I pray, but even powerful, effective prayer is no quick fix. Waiting on the Lord is hard.

Yes, it’s all very humbling.

That’s the difficult, but very good news about pain. Because it humbles me, it brings me “down to earth.” And earth is where God is with us, in His blessed incarnation. Once reserved in His heaven, God has joined me, and you, here in our painful, earthly states. So the more we are humbled, whether by pain or grief or poverty, the more He joins us in the flesh, on this earth.

Maybe for some people that is an abstraction, but for me nothing could be more genuine because pain is real. It breaks my body and almost breaks my heart. I couldn’t face another day or long night bearing it--not without a down-to-earth Savior who was born into pain and died through it into eternal life. Not without a Savior who promised to be with us always.

Because even more than misery does, humility loves His company.