Creation Every Day: Guiding Pain

“Pain guides us,” the doctor said, almost poetically. After enduring leg pain for six months, my friend Laura had visited a general practitioner, a gynecologist, two physical therapists, a chiropractor, and an internal medicine specialist who now pressed on her muscles searching for where the pain would lead him.

“What if you can’t find what’s wrong?” Laura asked.

He shrugged. “We all live with some pain or discomfort: diabetes, joint pain, seasonal allergies. You just learn to manage it.”

Even after thousands of years of medical practice, physicians have yet to fully chart the body’s maladies. Organs shut down. The immune system attacks the body. Cells over replicate. Hormones under produce.

Our bodies are complex—just like the curse upon them. But we are not merely souls trapped in a horrifically magnificent prison. The hope of Christ’s resurrection is for our bodies to join our souls in eternity, glorified to hurt no more. But for now, pain guides us to the One who not only suffered pain and death for us but redeems our pain as it leads us to trust more fully in him.