I don’t know if you’ve ever wished you could return to a past season of life. A past place with past people and past experiences. I’m guessing most of us have. I’ve found myself many a time wishing things were the way they used to be. I think, “Man, if I could only get back to that one place again, that would be the life. I would have it made and I would be happy again.” But have you ever actually had the opportunity to do so? It doesn’t happen often, but this current season I’m in has let me do just that. And you know what? I am miserable.
When I left Indiana, I was pretty burnt out. I had just faced a lot of rejection and, quite frankly, was biding my time for Georgia. My thought was, “It hurts, but it doesn’t even matter what happens to me here. I am about to go to Georgia and there I will have a home again. Then I can be with my people and this pain will leave me.” A valid desire to be sure, but unfortunately not very realistic.
When I arrived on the campus of AIM, I was surprised to find that nothing about it felt like home. The AIM I knew was gone, and I was a foreigner. I stood there alone, under the back porch, where I had memories with so many people. And as the wind blew and the leaves skittered, AIM felt like a memorial to what had been, and I was the last survivor of whatever had wiped out the people I loved.
I was alone. And I wept bitterly.
The song “Rivers and Roads” by The Head and the Heart described my situation perfectly. “A year from now we’ll all be gone. All our friends will move away. And they’re going to better places, but our friends will be gone away…”
And as I sat there, crying out to God and telling him what was on my heart. The words He gave me from my mom came echoing back to me. She said, “Jamison. Press into the pain, because it comes bearing gifts.” The grief I felt was irreconcilable, but that was a promise, and it gave me the courage I needed to press in.
All this raises an interesting question though. Is pain really such a bad thing? Our whole lives we are taught to run from it, and if we are feeling it then something is wrong. But what if we flip it around? What does it mean if we aren’t feeling pain? Is it possible that the lack of pain could mean something’s wrong? I have found that many times in my own life, if I wasn’t facing some sort of pain, it was because there was something I wasn’t dealing with. The more we distract ourselves to numb the pain, the longer the process will take. There are no shortcuts to it.
If we don’t have the courage to face our pain. We are doomed to repeat it.
Only when we give pain a voice will we be able to walk past it and become more of the person God created us to be. So if you haven’t felt pain in awhile and life has been daisies, you may need to ask yourself some questions. Please hear me though, the lack of pain doesn’t necessarily mean something is wrong either. It is merely a warning sign and God might just be blessing your life.
Time has helped. I am warming up to everyone and the Lord is showing me that I have a new role to play. He continues to speak promise into my life and has brought many solid men in to help mentor me. Let me tell you, I am blessed. It is with time and mentorship that the Lord has continued to bring revelation to me.
The heart has a funny way of leading us on with endless “what ifs” and “if onlys.” Jeremiah 17:9 says, “The heart is deceitful beyond all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?” When I came to Georgia, I thought I would find the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. My first thought was, “This pot is empty!” But honestly I don’t think the Lord gives empty pots. The gold just doesn’t look like what we expected. Many times the gold has to be mined out of the rock of pain.
That pain has shown me that the past doesn’t hold the answers. It’s shown me that the future doesn’t either. It’s shown me that the present might hold the answers if I am willing to sit with my Father and process through what he has placed in front of me. Because it’s only after we have taken time to sit with our pain, that we see that our pain has meaning, and that our pain really can be beautiful.
