I sometimes wonder if it is possible to go through life without causing others pain. I wonder if it is the human condition or just the Peter condition. The irony of it all for me is more than anything else in life I loathe causing others pain and yet I seem to have been the source of so much.

Is it possible to go through life and cause absolutely no one pain? This is not a rhetorical question.

If it is not possible then how does one deal with the inevitability of it all? I suspect a kind of triage is required where one determines how each decision will cause others pain and how much. Do we simply act in a way that causes the least amount of pain for someone? It sounds logical but what if a certain action causes three people pain and the one it hurts least is the one you love most? Complicated then eh?

Pain is an interesting capacity we have. Not just us but animals as well. Pain is designed to provide us with feedback that something is wrong. It is an early warning system and we are to respond by locating the source and alleviating. Physically this is fairly straight forward…the closer my hand gets to the flame the more it hurts creating an ever increasing urgency to remove said hand to safety.

Emotional and addictive pain is not nearly so straight forward. Let us say someone is abstaining from a drug that they have become addicted to like crack or heroin. They will feel pain as a result of withdrawal and the quickest way to remove that pain is to get another fix. The problem is this behavior will eventually kill them. In this instance we are to do the counter-intuitive thing and soldier through the pain trusting that on the other side things will be better.

What does emotional pain warn us of? Someone hurts us with words or actions either intentionally or unintentionally and we need to respond somehow – we either soldier through the pain or remove its source…which in this case is the other person. Removing the source can in fact ideally be communicating to the other person that they are causing pain and hopefully they will stop. But what if it keeps happening? Do you keep soldiering through? Do we respond to emotional pain differently than physical pain? How many times must someone poke us in the eye before we decide to turn our head? If we keep looking at them we will eventually become blind.

Pain is often as complex as human relationship. Pain is never so straight forward as if A than B because relationships look a lot like a cobweb…a messed up network of interconnectedness that bears no semblance of logic.

“In this world you will have trouble” said Christ in John 16:33. I pay attention to this because I follow him and need to take what he says seriously. There is little hope frankly in that statement and thankfully he follows up by saying “but take heart! I have overcome the world.” The hope in that final statement is that the trouble is temporary because Christ has overcome it. Still this is a little like telling a migraine victim that, while it hurts now it won’t last forever. Their desire is to simply bury their head in a pillow and tell you to get lost.

Earlier in the verse Christ talks about the pain of childbirth and how once the baby is born the pain that was is overwhelmed by the joy that is. I suppose what he is saying is that we must trust that the time to come and what the kingdom is birthing will overwhelm the current pain…and this is hopeful if we choose to set our sights on the time to come in the midst of the current pain.

If we do not set our sights on the future hope we have,whatever it is, then we are like a woman going through childbirth without actually having the baby. It is torturous and filled with despair.

In the midst of physical pain our future hope is the response of pulling away from the source of that pain. In the midst of emotional pain we must set our sights on a future hope that makes enduring the present pain bearable…