Pain

I believe I've heard something about this before. Maybe in a cheesy movie, maybe from my mom or possibly both but here is my take on it.

It's funny but I was thinking about how important pain is in my life. I guess I never really noticed it before so if I seem a bit naive, that's not necessarily true. I'm just slow.

I always considered the pain I went through growing up (and still some today) as what has contributed to making me the strong person I am now. In that sense, I was grateful for turning out the way I did. My brother struggles with the same issue and hasn't yet found strength from the pain. He's an incredibly angry person. The way I see it, we had no control over what happened to us then so we have two options : Let those people and experiences ruin us today, or use it to our benefit.

But I also noticed that pain in the smaller aspects of life seem to reveal change. For example, Riley is learning to walk. He is finding out rather quickly what he can and cannot do by the small bits of pain he feels on his bottom when he fails. This is how he learns. He'll learn many things from pain in the future. It's sad, but it's life. Obviously, I don't just mean physical pain.

Then Josh mentioned to me the other day about how he loves the day after a work out when his muscles hurt. He said he could feel them ripping while he was lifting weights, and that in a way feels good because it's progress. That's when the light went on over my head. I had just beeing feeling the same way about some new face wash I was using. It burns when I put it on and I remember thinking the first time, Oh that's good. That means it's working.

Besides healing and strength, fear is a result of pain. But as John Mayer says, Fear is as friend that's misunderstood. See as I said before, Riley is learning from fear. He has a few fears that are irrational, but he will eventually learn that he won't be hurt by those things. It's the things that do hurt him he should fear, and he is slowly learning that. Children are famous for the monster under the bed syndrom but it's really no different for adults. Our monsters have simply changed location.

I realized just yesterday that I still have a few monsters and one of them lives at church. That's a fear that has no basis, as nothing there can really hurt me. There are people there that could do me harm, but I've learned to spot them. I've learned how to handle them. See once you grab that thing you're scared of, it usually turns out just to be a pile of clothes, right?

So to sum things up, pain is an important aspect of life. It is necessary if change is expected.

Besides, there's nothing you can really do about it.