Tag: pain

Dealing with the pain of infertility

pain by trying2

I’ve really been impressed and appreciative of all the things Jason Kovacs does. It’s been great getting to know him and his ministry over the last several months via his blogs and Twitter (@jasonkovacs).

Last week, Jason shared a great post on what he learned from the story of Hannah (1 Samuel 1) and her husband in Scripture…

Hannah taught me that it is natural for a woman to desire to have children. Woman all around the world can relate to her. My wife painfully longed to be a mother. Initially I didn’t know what to do with her emotional response to not being pregnant. To me it seemed so disproportionate to how I felt…. I felt like Hannah’s husband, who said to her: “why is your heart sad? Am I not more to you than ten sons?” That approach didn’t work in Hannah’s day and it still doesn’t work today.

I ditto that statement. I will never fully understand the pain and sadness that Laurie feels as we struggle with our infertility. Yes, my heart hurts because we haven’t been able to get pregnant — but my desire is no where near that of Laurie’s.
Continue reading Dealing with the pain of infertility

Do we transform our pain … or transmit it?

Brian McLaren shares some great thoughts from Fr. Richard Rohr ::

Is your religion helping you to transform your pain? If it does not, it is junk religion. We all have pain—it’s the human situation, we all carry it in a big black bag behind us and it gets heavier as we get older: by betrayals, rejections, disappointments, and wounds that are inflicted along the way.

If we do not find some way to transform our pain, I can tell you with 100% certitude we will transmit it to those around us. We will create tension, negativity, suspicion, and fear wherever we go…

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My enemies are men like me

I read this great thought and quote this morning while reflecting on Brian’s message yesterday about forgiveness.

Someone has written that hatred is like drinking a cup of poison and waiting for the person you hate to die. It doesn’t harm the person you hate, or at least not in any way like the havoc it wreaks on you. In fact, hatred has the exact opposite effect of what you would hope for; a wise man in Cormac McCarthy’s novel Cities of the Plain explains that “Our enemies . . . seem always with us. The greater our hatred the more persistent the memory of them so that a truly terrible enemy becomes deathless. So that the man who has done you great injury or injustice makes himself a guest in your house forever. Perhaps only forgiveness can dislodge him.”

But God help us, forgiveness can be a really hard thing to do.

…not dealing with emotional and spiritual cancer like internalized rage is a disaster. It’s like ignoring physical cancer and hoping it will go away.

Perhaps my enemies are much more like us than we’d ever want to admit and as Brian mentioned yesterday, forgiving them is the only thing that can really set us free.