Where is God in the Pain?
It doesn’t take long when talking with someone who is skeptical of the Christian faith for the topic of pain to emerge. For that matter, it isn’t uncommon for someone who has faithfully followed Christ for years to be shaken in their belief in a good God amid trauma.
I’m not setting out to formulate a treatise on pain and suffering in this post, but I do want to share a story that, to me at least, illustrates one possible angle from which to look at things like loss, tragedy, and disappointment… and how to reconcile the inevitable agony of life with the character of a good, present, and loving Father.
I have four sons. The oldest, Aidan, turned 8 a couple of weeks ago. This story is about him when he was just about eighteen months old. My wife was either pregnant or had just had our second child – my memory fails me at the moment – and I was outside with Aidan to give Steph some breathing room. Our house was elevated above street level by several feet which meant our driveway sloped down at a pretty steep angle. As was customary, Aidan was running around our yard, burning off his boundless toddler energy. At some point, he ran onto our sloping driveway and was headed toward the street when he tripped and fell. Most people instinctively put their hands out when they are falling to break the fall, but Aidan threw his arms back like superman and he landed on his face. To be more specific, he landed on his front tooth. From where I stood, I could hear the distinctive snap of bone on concrete, and as he rolled over I immediately saw fragments of tooth on his lips and tongue. Most of the damage was initially obscured by blood, but I could tell that he had at very least sheered his front tooth in half.
I scooped him up and I entered the house as calmly as I could with a bleeding and hysterical toddler, and I tried my best to play it cool for Steph, as I didn’t want to upset her unnecessarily, acting as though this sort of incident was routine. After cleaning him up as best we could, I called a dentist friend of mine in Oklahoma to get his professional opinion as to which action we should take next. From the pictures I texted him, he confirmed that we needed to take him to a pediatric oral surgeon to have the remainder of the tooth extracted, and to ensure that his jaw wasn’t broken.
After our consultation with the surgeon, he confirmed that yes, indeed, we would need to remove the fragment of tooth that remained so that it wouldn’t get infected, and that, somewhat miraculously, nothing else had been damaged according to the X-rays. He presented us with two treatment options:
- We could fully sedate him, and they would extract the tooth
or - Or we could give him a local anesthetic and extract the tooth while he was awake
We were assured that, though option two would be very uncomfortable for him, he would not likely remember it, and since we were paying out of pocket and option one was more expensive by an order of magnitude, we opted for the local anesthetic.
When the day arrived to have the procedure, Steph nominated me to accompany Aidan. Though it was a simple extraction, it was still quite a process to prepare him because of the way it had sheared up into the gum. Finally, the time arrived for the surgery and we made our way back to the operating room. They had already given him a sedative, because of which he had temporarily fallen asleep, and now I laid his little body on the operating table (see picture above) so they could inject his gums with Novocain. The doctor informed me they would probably need my help once they put the instrument in his mouth to pull the root out of its socket. They explained that he would need to be held still so that he wouldn’t cause further pain or damage by thrashing about. Sure enough, as soon as the nurses restrained him and he saw a gleaming piece of metal moving toward his face, he fully awoke and fought back with passion. With wide, terrified eyes he writhed and screamed and the staff was clearly struggling to hold him still enough to get the apparatus in his mouth. The nurses motioned for me to literally climb on top of him to hold him down: my chest on his chest, my leg hooked over his legs. The nurses held his arms and his head in a vice grip. My face was just about 8 inches from his. He couldn’t talk much yet at 18 months old – not much more than ‘dada’ – but his big blue eyes communicated well enough in that moment. They said, ‘you’re a TRAITOR! I trusted you, and it turns out you’re one of THEM! You could get me out of this. Why are you DOING THIS TO ME?!’ It broke my heart. I began to whisper to him:
‘I love you buddy… I’m right here… I’m not going anywhere… we’re going to get through this together… you’re my boy… you don’t understand right now, but if we don’t do this, if we don’t go through this pain, it will likely get infected and cause you a whole world of hurt in the future… I love you… I’m right here…’
And just as quickly as they got the instrument in his mouth, the doctor made one firm movement and the root pulled free. They immediately gave him something like sugar water and he was as happy as a clam, as if nothing ever happened! He seemed to make a full recovery within minutes, and went bounding back out to the car with a sucker, a little box bearing the tooth fragment, and handful of stickers to mark his experience.
A couple weeks later I found myself reflecting on that day, and something like the following conversation ensued:
Me: “God, that whole interaction between me and Aidan was a lot like how You and I function, huh?”
God: “Yep. I have a perspective you don’t have. Just like how Aidan at eighteen months couldn’t possibly comprehend the idea of an infection, and how you, as his father, knew it was the most loving course of action to have the tooth extracted… so I see the whole playing field and possess a level of understanding you simply do not have. As a loving Father, I know the things that need to be extracted now so they don’t cause major damage in the years to come.”
Me: “I get that on a conceptual level, but man, the pain can be so intense.”
God: “Yes, it can. But remember, just like how you were with Aidan, I am with you, speaking to you. Many people accuse me in their place of pain, just like Aidan accused you with his eyes. But if you listen closely, you will hear My heart for you. The more you get to know Me, the more you will be able to trust me when I’m restraining you, knowing that, ultimately, it’s for your good.”
I can’t say that now I celebrate immediately whenever life is hard, but my level of trust in God’s wisdom, and, more importantly, in His love for me, has steadily increased over the years on the heels of this revelation, and others like it.
May it be so for you as well. May your trust in the Father’s great wisdom, together with his tender love, only deepen with time. And may the words of Paul in Romans 5:2-5 become a living reality for you, in an ever-increasing manner for the rest of your life.
“Through him we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God. 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.” Rom 5:2-5