rejoice in suffering

Tuesday Prayer: Seasons

~ Heather Davis ~ Leave a comment

The earth is the LORD’s and the fullness thereof, the world and those who dwell therein,
(Psalms 24:1)

Awesome Creator, the earth is Yours and all it contains. From the vast expanse of the heavens which declare Your glory all the way to the tiniest details like the number of hairs on our heads, You are intimately acquainted with every bit. You have also made the world and its cycles, and You have provided the sun, moon, and stars to document the signs and seasons and days and years. All of it ultimately points to You, Lord, declaring Your glory and teaching us of Your ways.

Our lives, too, are governed by seasons. There are times of frantic activity and times of rest; seasons marked by trial and turmoil and seasons of utter peace and pure joy. As we grow in Christ and deepen our walk with You, the trials and the joys begin to overlap and become one because we begin to see how You use all of it – the good and the bad – to work together for the good of we who love You. Because of this, we can honestly rejoice in our suffering.

Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance,
(Romans 5:3)

Not only because of our trust in You to take what our enemy intends for evil and use it for good, but we can also rejoice because we do not serve a distant and impartial God. Instead, we serve a God who became a man and endured suffering as a man. You have suffered, and so we know that every moment of pain or trial is a glimpse into what You have already done for us.

So often, Lord, we turn things upside down, wondering why our amazing God would allow suffering in the world. A better understanding of You have us marvel at the wonder of a God who loves His creation so completely that He was willing to become a part of it, to suffer and die for it, so that by His priceless blood, all of creation might be redeemed.

When our life seasons bring times of darkness or hardship, remind us of Your love. Remind us that even the darkness is not dark to You, Lord, for nothing is hidden from Your light and nothing escapes Your notice. Nothing is wasted. No season is useless in the eternal economy of Your grace. Even our suffering and our blunders, even our scars and wounds are given purpose and meaning when surrendered to You.

If I say, “Surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light about me be night,” even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is bright as the day, for darkness is as light with you.
(Psalms 139:11-12)

Because You are good, we can trust You even in the dark and lonely places for if we belong to You, we are never actually alone. You have promised never to leave us nor forsake us. Teach our hearts a greater trust, a more complete devotion, and an endless sense of awe at the wonder of You, the King of Glory. May our lives be lived for Your service and our days be committed to loving obedience to Your purposes, amen.

Rejoicing in Hope

~ Heather Davis ~ 11 Comments

I love the photo above. It was taken roughly a year ago in March of 2017 during one of the two weekends of winter we had last year in Middle Tennessee.

Despite having been taken at the end of the winter that really wasn’t, I still enjoy the hope portrayed by this image. In part, it reminds me of  winters of the soul I have endured.

Yet even in the gloomiest and most frigid seasons in my life – actually, even if my entire life was spent in the icy clutches of physical pain and emotional distress – there is something growing beneath the surface.

Hope.

Rejoice in hope, be patient in tribulation, be constant in prayer.
(Romans 12:12)

No matter how much other reading I have done the last couple of weeks, the Lord keeps bringing me back to Romans 5 and the idea of rejoicing in suffering.

So today, I did just that.

It’s a beautiful spring day and I took a walk with my Father and my two dogs. Normally at such times, I will offer up prayers of supplication. And for the first 5 or 6 minutes, I did. But the verse kept playing like a broken record in my mind (for you young ‘uns, that’s roughly the equivalent of an mp3 file which didn’t download correctly).

So I stopped my requests and simply rejoiced.

As the occasional pounding behind my left eye grew more regular, I rejoiced that migraines have slowed me down enough to pay attention to what is important in life.

With each step, an ache set up in my left foot and my shoe seemed to tighten as it swelled, so I rejoiced that I can still walk anyway.

In fact, I was able to praise my Father from the heart and mean it for all my little grievances.

Not only because each ache and pain reminds me of the intense joy I will feel once this old body has finally worn down and been traded in for something better. But also because my God is using the time right now for His glory.

…and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God. Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings…
(Romans 5:2b-3a)

Today, He had me back up a little and remember that my rejoicing is based in His glory.

His, not mine.

It is because of my physical issues that I am able to meet weekly with one of my part-time daughters, a teen who suffers from chronic migraine and has need of help in her home schooling.

Because of my suffering, I am available when another part-time daughter, also a teen, needs to talk due to family crisis. Or to help her mom when she’s trying to juggle her own reactions to the crisis, plus be a mom, plus keep her job, plus…

And you know what? I can rejoice because God does not need my efforts to provide financially for my family. He is fully capable of taking care of our needs, and He has never let us down.

So today, I took a couple of hours and laid down my guilt over the smallness of my financial contribution, the anxiety over rising tuition and a 20-year-old home in which everything is deciding to break, my frustration over the difficulties in parenting teens, and my weariness with pain.

I laid them all before the Throne of Grace and worshiped.

Because my God is good.

Because He has blessed me with these difficulties so I will never forget my need of Him.

Because my Lord Yeshua (Jesus) suffered pain on my behalf and overcame.

Because He can do amazing things and He doesn’t need me to do them.

And yet, He has given me the privilege of being a part of it all.

The man declares, I am weary, O God; I am weary, O God, and worn out…
…Every word of God proves true; he is a shield to those who take refuge in him.
(Proverbs 30:1, 5)

 

Useful Suffering

~ Heather Davis ~ 4 Comments

Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.
(Romans 5:3-5)

There is nothing quite like being a parent to highlight certain Scriptures with excruciating clarity.

Since Ash Wednesday, I’ve been reading and re-reading in the book of Romans, going through a couple of chapters over my breakfast and diving into a smaller portion for closer study when the meal has been consumed.

My weekend reading focused on chapters 9 and 10, which a read through a handful of times. I broke today’s fast with eggs scrambled with kale, onion, and red bell pepper along with a side of Romans 11, the previous two chapters still fresh on my mind. Then over coffee, I turned to Romans 5 for examination.

And I saw a horrifying glimpse of the grief our Creator feels over the rebellion of His creation. His children.

I saw it because I recognized a tiny sliver of His grief in Paul’s impassioned words from Romans 9:2-3:

…I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart. For I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brothers, my kinsmen according to the flesh.

And I recognized it because now that my own little brood have begun trying their wings, I share a human-sized portion of the same unceasing anguish, not only for my brothers, but for my children.

If I could trade my salvation for the assurance of each of theirs, I would do it without a second thought. Now with our oldest counting down the months until legal adulthood, I am more certain of this than ever before.

There is definitely anguish in my heart as I watch him stumble into a trap lined with acceptance but secular to its purposeless core. Only weeks after I’d bragged on what a delight he has become, he has seemed to turn a darker corner and morphed into the stereotypical rude, withdrawn teenager.

And the people who have his heart are not my brothers and sisters in Christ as before. I do not even know where they come from, but he is more connected with them than with any portion of the Body of Christ at present. This is a source of terrible grief for me.

And yet, I know there will truly be no greater joy for me than if I live to see him and his sisters walk in the Truth.

For now, however, I pray. I watch. I search the Word for wisdom and guidance. And I pray even more.

Through it all, I also rejoice in this season of parental suffering because, while it is intensely frightening and painful to watch my firstborn dancing around a fire which threatens to consume him, I know this form of suffering, too, brings endurance.

Endurance in prayer, greater hope in the faithfulness of my Lord.

But it also because this heartache helps me to understand with greater poignancy the never-failing, never-ceasing capacity for forgiveness and love held by my Father’s many times shattered heart. And also because through this anguish, I begin to better understand His keen joy when even one lost child is found and begins to walk in truth.

Lord, forgive me the hurts I have inflicted on You by my rebellion and untrusting ways. I never knew what pain was until now. Please guide my children to You. May they become Your children more truly than ever they were mine, and we rejoice together to someday see them walk in Your Truth.  

 

Migraine Chronicles: Description and Confession

~ Heather Davis ~ 15 Comments

…the pain that gnaws me takes no rest.
(Job 30:17b)

Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance…
(Romans 5:3)

To kick off a discussion about migraine, I’d like to begin by making sure we are all on the same page by stating for the record that a migraine is not just a headache. It is a full-body neurological experience of which the headache pain is only the climax.

A true migraine can (but does not always) involve up to four phases: the prodrome which can occur hours or even days before; the aura which afflicts about 20-25% of migraine sufferers and usually immediately precedes the headache phase; the migraine attack which involves intense, one-sided headache pain accompanied by sensitivity to lights, sounds, smells, and/or nausea and vomiting; and the postdrome, affectionately known to many migraine sufferers as the “migraine hangover.”

And to be honest, there are a host of additional symptoms that sometimes occur ranging from visual disturbances to difficulties in speech or cognition; a list which can become disturbingly varied and long. Suffice to say that calling a migraine a headache does not quite do the experience justice.

Chronic migraine is another thing altogether. Typically, it begins with distinct episodes of migraine that, over time, progress to a relentless , one-sided headache with the potential to morph into and out of a full-blown migraine episode without warning.

From my personal experience with chronic migraine, the entire migraine sequence can become one jumbled mess, and some months are better than others with or without medication. It is from this that I can feel empathy for Job when he said, ” … the pain that gnaws at me takes no rest,” because I have been there.

How did it come to this? Hard to say. The best educated guess I have heard is that I sustained some nerve damage during a bout of viral meningitis back in 2004. Perhaps it did not help matters much that I’m a bit prone to push through pain and so was not hospitalized until the third day – and I mean three days of being unable to sleep for the pain in my head and unable to hold down so much as a tiny trickle of water from a medicine dropper.

Yeah, I know. Not too bright. But sometimes you just do what you have to do.

And today, I have to confess.

I am just coming out of two very dark weeks beginning with a particularly hideous 72-hour prodrome followed by about a 10-11 day stretch of various levels of migraine ranging from “I am functional but I may take 2 hours for a 20-minute grocery run and may wear sunglasses indoors,” to “Uncle.”

And because our enemy does like to kick us when we are down, he really laid on the temptation – and I fell for it. I freely confess that I spent an embarrassing number of days in a full-on pity party. It was pathetic, actually, and whether it can be argued that I had cause or not, sin is still sin and I must accept full responsibility for my complicity.

While my husband and I have prayed for and believe that God is able to heal me of this, we also realize that He will only do so if it serves His purposes. Sometimes I lose sight of this. In fact, I sometimes lose sight of Him and fix my eyes only on my problems, as I did last week.

That’s where today’s second verse comes in. Even though there may be pain in life, pain is not always bad. Often, God has lessons for us to learn through the pain.

What I was reminded of first and foremost was to look “to Jesus, the Founder and Perfecter of my faith, Who for the glory that was set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame,” and to “consider Him who endured from sinners such hostility against Himself so that you may not grow weary or fainthearted” (see Hebrews 12:2-3).

Here’s the thing that my little excursion into sinful self-focus reminded me: He did not deserve to suffer. I do.

And so, today I consider Him and bow myself in reverence and humility, rejoicing that while the father of lies desires to use my pain to drive me into sin, my Father can use the same tool to bring about contemplation of His grace.

And when I contemplate the goodness and meekness of my King, I find that I can rejoice in my suffering because He has suffered, too. Even in pain, I am never alone.

I’m interested… what helps you cope with chronic pain?