Pain, gratitude, and thanksgiving …

What’s your threshold for dealing with physical pain?

Mine is low.

I know a guy who lived for quite some time with a torn rotator cuff. Having personally experienced a partial tear to my rotator cuff, I could strongly empathize with him regarding his pain, but he had a remarkable threshold for enduring physical pain. He certainly endured his level of physical suffering better than I would have.

I’m much better with mental or emotional pain, that’s where my threshold is quite high. But whether physical, mental, or emotional, pain is something every human being strives to avoid; there’s nothing pleasant about pain.

Philip Yancey, writing in Where is God When it Hurts?, contrasts two different kinds of books on the topic of pain:

Books on the problem of pain divide neatly into two groupings. The older ones, by people like Aquinas, Bunyan, Donne, Luther, Calvin, and Augustine, ungrudgingly accept pain and suffering as God’s useful agents. These authors do not question God’s actions. They merely try to “justify the ways of God to man.”

The authors wrote with confidence, as if the sheer force of their reasoning could calm emotional responses to suffering. Modern books on pain make a sharp contrast. Their authors assume that the amount of evil and suffering in the world cannot be matched with the traditional view of a good and loving God. God is thus bumped from a “friend of the court” position to the box reserved for the defendant.

“How can you possibly justify yourself, God?” these angry moderns seem to say. Many of them adjust their notion of God, either by redefining his love or by questioning his power to control evil. When you read the two categories of books side by side, the change in tone is quite striking. It’s as if we in modern times think we have a corner on the suffering market.

Do we forget that Luther and Calvin lived in a world without ether and penicillin, when life expectancy averaged thirty years, and that Bunyan and Donne wrote their greatest works, respectively, in a jail and a plague quarantine room? Ironically, the modern authors — who live in princely comfort, toil in climate-controlled offices, and hoard elixirs in their medicine cabinets—are the ones smoldering with rage.

There’s another category of book that speaks deeply and wisely on the topic of pain, and that’s the Bible. I’ve recently begun yet another reading of the book of Job, which in just the first two chapters reports a level of pain, suffering, and loss that most (if not all) of us will never experience.

How did he respond?

“Job stood up and tore his robe in grief. Then he shaved his head and fell to the ground to worship. He said, ‘I came naked from my mother’s womb, and I will be naked when I leave. The Lord gave me what I had, and the Lord has taken it away. Praise the name of the Lord!’ In all of this, Job did not sin by blaming God,” Job 1:20-22.

After such overwhelming loss — including the deaths of all 10 of his children in a single tragedy — Job praises the name of the Lord. As I thought about this, it struck me that such an offering of praise couldn’t be sincere unless there was deeply engrained in the life of the person a profound gratitude.

Job had lived such a life of integrity before God that his Creator actually boasted about him to Satan (Job 1:8, 2:3). Living such a life is built by establishing a deeply engrained gratitude to God for who He is and His goodness — for who He is in our lives, for what He has done and does, and knowing that “Whatever is good and perfect is a gift coming down to us from God our Father, who created all the lights in the heavens. He never changes or casts a shifting shadow,” James 1:17.

Gratitude that is deeply engrained in the character of a person must express itself, such as in giving thanks and, such as in Job’s instance, in offering praise to God.

Pain, suffering, and loss only motivate us to blame or berate God when our hearts and minds are absent of (or at least woefully lacking in) gratitude. But a person whose character is one of integrity before God will have a base of gratitude to draw from in any situation, regardless of the consequences.

Job’s wife couldn’t understand this …

“So Satan left the Lord’s presence, and he struck Job with terrible boils from head to foot. Job scraped his skin with a piece of broken pottery as he sat among the ashes. His wife said to him, ‘Are you still trying to maintain your integrity? Curse God and die.’ But Job replied, ‘You talk like a foolish woman. Should we accept only good things from the hand of God and never anything bad?’ So in all this, Job said nothing wrong,” Job 2:7-10.

Do you have a level of gratitude ingrained deeply into your life so that, no matter your circumstances, you can, like Job, say, “Praise the name of the Lord!”?

Scotty