Topic : Pain

Elizabeth Prentiss, the wife of a Presbyterian minister, spent most of her adult life as an invalid, seldom knowing a day without constant pain throughout her body. Yet she was described by her friends as a bright-eyed, cheery woman with a keen sense of humor.

Elizabeth was always strong in faith and encouraging to others, until tragedy struck the Prentiss family beyond what even she could bear. The loss of two of their children brought great sorrow to Elizabeth’s life. For weeks no one could console her. In her diary she wrote of “empty hands, a worn-out, exhausted body, and unutterable longings to flee from a world that has so many sharp experiences.”

During this period of grief, Elizabeth cried out to God, asking Him to minister to her broken spirit. It was at this time that Elizabeth’s story became a living testimony! For over 100 years the Body of Christ has been encouraged as they sing the words penned by Elizabeth Prentiss in her deepest sorrow:

More love to Thee, O Christ, more love to Thee!
Hear Thou the prayer I make on bended knee;
This is my earnest plea:
More love, O Christ, to Thee…

Once earthly joy I craved, sought peace and rest;
Now Thee alone I seek—Give what is best;
This all my prayer shall be:
More love, O Christ, to Thee…

Let sorrow do its work, send grief and pain;
Sweet are Thy messengers, sweet their refrain,
When they can sing with me,
More love, O Christ, to Thee…

Then shall my latest breath whisper Thy praise;
This be the parting cry my heart shall raise;
This still its prayer shall be:
More love, O Christ, to Thee.

Tom White, “Living Testimonies,” The Voice of the Martyrs, July, 1998, p. .2

We can rest contentedly in our sins and in our stupidities, and everyone who has watched gluttons shoveling down the most exquisite foods as if they did not know what they were eating, will admit that we can ignore even pleasure. But pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our consciences, but shouts in our pains. It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.

C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

I heard Professor Bruce Waltke describe a Christian’s response to pain this way: We once rescued a wren from the claws of our cat. Thought its wing was broken, the frightened bird struggled to escape my loving hands.

Contrast this with my daughter’s recent trip to the doctor. Her strep throat meant a shot was necessary. Frightened, she cried, “No, Daddy. No, Daddy, No, Daddy.” But all the while she gripped me tightly around the neck. Pain ought to make us more like a sick child than a hurt bird.

Bruce Waltke

Though thou with clouds of anger do disguise Thy face;
yet through that mask I know those eyes,
Which, though they turn away sometimes,
They never will despise.

John Donne, “A Hymn to Christ”

• Everything difficult indicates something more than our theory of life yet embraces. - George MacDonald

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Dr. Paul W. Brand, the noted leprosy expert who was chief of the rehabilitation branch of the Leprosarium in Carville, Lousiana, had a frightening experience one night when he thought he had contracted leprosy. Dr. Brand arrived in London one night after an exhausting transatlantic ocean trip and long train ride from the English coast. He was getting ready for bed, had taken off his shoes, and as he pulled off a sock, discovered there was no feeling in his heel. To most anyone else this discovery would have meant very little, a momentary numbness. But Dr. Brand was world famous for his restorative surgery on lepers in India. He had convinced himself and his staff at the leprosarium that there was no danger of infection from leprosy after it reached a certain stage. The numbness in his heel terrified him. In her biography of Dr. Brand, Ten Fingers for God, Dorothy Clarke Wilson says,

He rose mechanically, found a pin, sat down again, and pricked the small area below his ankle. He felt no pain. He thrust the pin deeper, until a speck of blood showed. Still he felt nothing…He supposed, like other workers with leprosy, he had always half expected it.… In the beginning probably not a day had gone by without the automatic searching of his body for the telltale patch, the numbed area of skin.

All that night the great orthopedic surgeon tried to imagine his new life as a leper, an outcast, his medical staff’s confidence in their immunity shattered by his disaster. And the forced separation from his family. As night receded, he yielded to hope and in the morning, with clinical objectivity, ‘with steady fingers he bared the skin below his ankle, jabbed in the point—and yelled.’

Blessed was the sensation of pain! He realized that during the long train ride, sitting immobile, he had numbed a nerve. From then on, whenever Dr. Brand cut his finger, turned an ankle, even when he suffered from “agonizing nausea as his whole body reacted in violent self-protection from mushroom poisoning, he was to respond with fervent gratitude, ‘Thank God for pain!’”

Ten Fingers for God, by Dorothy Clarke Wilson, pp. 142-14.

Pain is not good in itself. What is good in any painful experience is, for the sufferer, his submission to the will of God, and, for the spectators, the compassion aroused and the acts of mercy to which it leads.

C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

The story is told about the baptism of King Aengus by St. Patrick in the middle of the fifth century. Sometime during the rite, St. Patrick leaned on his sharp-pointed staff and inadvertently stabbed the king’s foot. After the baptism was over, St. Patrick looked down at all the blood, realized what he had done, and begged the king’s forgiveness. “Why did you suffer this pain in silence,” the Saint wanted to know. The king replied, “I thought it was part of the ritual.”

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At the busy dental office where I work, one patient was always late. Once when I called to confirm an appointment, he said, "I'll be about 15 minutes late. That won't be a problem, will it"'

"No,? I told him. "We just won't have time to give you an anesthetic.'

He arrived early.

Contributed by Terri Spaccarotelli, Reader's Digest, June, 1992, p. 145

"Pain is not a problem in and of itself.  But rather, it is a symptom, a sign of something gone wrong.  When one places their hand on a stove, the problem is not the pain but it's the fact they are doing something that shouldn't be done.  The pain in this world is simply a sign that something is wrong; something is seriously messed-up.  Without pain, we may never realize that something is wrong.'

~ Paule Patterson III