PAIN HAS a TIPPING-POINT

Not too many days pass without receiving a message from someone through social media or through my website about a present adversity that they are navigating. Not only is it an honor that they trust me with their plights, but my way of honoring them back is by humbly offering them my personal pain insights. And for the record, you don't learn ministry through a textbook or curriculum. Rather, you learn it through being personally in touch with brokenness. And as I read their pain-soaked words, I realize that pain has no bias. It is not bent towards one type of person or family over another. Pain does not pre-judge. Pain simply becomes pain when it’s felt.I know much about mental pain and how to decipher its sensation through personal experience. Not because I am someone strong, but because I’ve recognized pains tipping point. It teeters inside of us like a spinning toy--causing nausea and confusion--spiraling its distress with every turn; until we decide to stop watching it spin within by changing our focus to a fixed point without. Staying pain-centered keeps us out of control internally, where our concentration on the pain only magnifies its turmoil.I try to minister to those who write to me about pain management. And first and foremost is to know that going through pain (physically, mentally/emotionally, or spiritually) doesn’t make you less than human. In fact, this is how you identify that you are a human on earth; and that very ache is a thirst for a taste of heaven on earth and that which can only be fully quenched after earth. But in the meantime, the pain must be the reason you seek a fixed position, lest you go topsy-turvy by spinning with the pain instead of pushing the pain over. Not pushing it down, but pushing it out. Ask any mother about her relief in child-birth. It doesn’t come until the pain is pushed through and the baby is pushed out. The arrival of joy, personified in person. The true tipping point!Well, we too can have the arrival of joy from pain, which is also personified in a Person. However, this joy only comes when your center becomes this Person.  His Presence alone balances out our pain and transitions it to passion. But you must be the one that determines to push it out to let Him in! The tipping point therefore, is the point that you admit your weakness in pain and the point where Jesus meets you with His strength in your pain. Thus, the prerequisite to true joy in Christ is feeling pain in this life. Pain is human, but joy is divine! “Do not sorrow, for the joy of the Lord is your strength” (Nehemiah 8:10).“And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes; there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying.  There shall be no more pain, for the former things have passed away” (Revelation 21:4).