Medicate or Mourn?

I called my dentist and asked him if he could meet me at his office. He was kind enough to agree.

Yes, it was a Sunday morning. Yes, I left church just before the worship service started. But had I waited until the next day, regular office hours, that small area of swelling would have looked more like I’d sprouted a second head out of my neck.

Isaac’s elbow-plant to the right side of my face the night before during a tickle fight (this was several years ago) turned out to be well placed. It released to the surface the mysterious origin of two long years of pain and discomfort.

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Every few months I stopped in to see my dentist. He and his assistants quizzed me about stress, grinding, sleep habits, children, work . . . anything that might explain the generalized pain, but did not.

He took x-rays. They revealed nothing.

He ground down the teeth on that side over and over. The whirring drill and tooth dust smell provided relief for only weeks at a time.

I ate Advil by the handful and found a strange sort of comfort in Mountain Dew and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups each night.

Ironic that it would take a blow to the head to at last get a little respite from the pain.

That morning while I hung upside down in his chair the doc discovered what only the jarring allowed him to see. The tooth was cracked, in a way an x-ray couldn’t pick up.

He pulled it.

Hasn’t hurt since.

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Pain, sometimes blinding, screamed at me for two years that my tooth was broken. All of our efforts to relieve the pain masked it ever so briefly. But they did nothing to resolve it.

Pain is not  an end to itself — it simply tells us that something is in need of attention.

If I had my druthers, I’d wrap it up right there. Point made.

But it seems God is running the point a little deeper for me these days. I have some other fractures hiding beyond the reach of an x-ray, some broken parts in need of attention.

And I just want some Advil.

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I’m in the middle of memorizing the Sermon on the Mount. Well, not quite the middle. I’m still in Chapter 5 of Matthew’s Gospel. But because of the repetition* involved in such an undertaking, I am reminded daily that Jesus was very clear on mourning. What comes of mourning is comfort. Listen:

Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. (Matthew 5:4)

Mourning is not the same as medicating. And comfort is not the same as relief.

There is with mourning a sense of reaching deep into the pain and living with it for a while. Not tolerating it, but experiencing it, letting it move and work in us. Feeling it. Having it.

And with comfort there is something lasting, life-giving that you don’t get in a bottle from the pharmacy.

If you know me at all, you’re shaking your head and chuckling, because you know that I don’t know what I’m talking about. I don’t do this stuff. I flatline my emotions, avoid peaks and valleys alike in favor of a stable disposition. (Though my kids and husband can probably tell you I’m pretty good at cranky.)

I don’t get into my feelings and live with them for a while. I get rid of them like a kid playing Hot Potato.

But honestly? We don’t get comfort unless we agree to mourn.

We only get relief.

Even as I write this, there’s acid brewing in my belly, and I want to go read a book. Do some laundry. Read one of the hundred-some blog posts in my Reader. Write an email. Start writing on Ruth. Find some relief.

That’s our knee-jerk. We avoid pain and seek relief as instinct.

And when we do that, we miss out on comfort.

We also miss out on the work God wanted to do through the pain.

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I spent some time with myself in the car this weekend. As I drove down the highway, I wrestled God on this issue. I think I can be more useful to Him in a stable and reasonable form. He seemed to think I could benefit from the work He does through pain. I pulled out my notebook and wrote the following:

Even if I look like a crazy person? Even if.

Okay. Let my emotion rise to the surface.

But then let me deal with it rightly.

When we allow ourselves to mourn, I think, we begin to recognize sin (which, of course, leads to more mourning). We understand mercy (and begin to act out more in mercy).

We allow ourselves to be soft enough that God can do some work in us.

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I’m noticing too that mourning makes me hungry. Not just a few words later in that same Sermon, Jesus said this:

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled. (Matthew 5:6)

When I don’t seek immediate relief, when I allow myself to live with the pain in my soul, I find that my hunger for more of Jesus grows. In 63, David as Psalmist wrote that his soul thirsted for God, his whole being yearned for Him as though in a dry land where there was no water. I like the Spanish word for that yearning, anhela, because it is so much bigger than the English word lets me grasp.

David goes on to declare that his soul will be satisfied as though dining at a dazzling banquet table.

But before he understood the mouthwatering splendor of that feast, he had to feel the hunger.

He laid out in the desert sun, parched, with an anhela for water that would restore him.

He allowed God to let the pain rise to the surface.

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A friend and I talked about this kind of pain. Grief that leads to repentance, Godly sorrow, mourning that leads to real comfort. Hunger that leads to being filled.

When I said that I asked God to let it rise, she asked, “Do you know what you’re getting yourself into?”

Truth? I don’t know.

But I’m not sure I can live with the alternative any more.

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Funny that as I pondered this post over the past few days God would reinforce it. Jennifer has an eloquent and moving poem reminding us that our pain allows us to experience God’s grace and goodness.

*Not the point of this post, but here are a couple of Scripture memory tools which, in combination, I’m finding to be very helpful as I tackle a larger slab of Scripture than I’ve done since, well, than I’ve done.

• The “convert-the-passage-to-a-block-of just-the-first-letter-of-each-word” tool (thanks to Jennifer at Getting Down with Jesus and Ann Voskamp of A Holy Experience). Goofy? Yes. But it works.
• The 6×6 Scripture Memory Strategy from Fighter Verses.