The Sacrament of Pain part II “The Curse”

For whatever reason hunting season brought me injury. It wasn’t any hunting accidents that caused the hurt, but for three years in a row, when my dad went up north to hunt white tail deer, I got injured. One year a couple of friends and I were chasing a classmate around the huge school yard of Angell Elementary School in Berkley, Michigan. As he ran around the outside fence I climbed it to cut him off at the pass. This was a six foot high, chain link fence that encircled the entire grounds at Angell. As I was hopping over the barrier my shoe lace became entangled in the bent-over wire at the top. I plunged to the small strip of grass between the fence and the curb, landing on my head. I don’t remember too much after seeing the speeding grass approaching my face, but I do remember the headache for the next couple of days. The doctor said that I had received a concussion from the fall. My father got the wonderful news when he called home from his week in the north woods. I never climbed that fence again.
This cycle of learning has been true through all of my life. I believe that most of humanity has a very similar learning pattern and the root of this goes way back to the beginnings.
“… the LORD God asked. "Have you eaten the fruit I commanded you not to eat?" 12"Yes," Adam admitted, "but it was the woman you gave me who brought me the fruit, and I ate it." 13Then the LORD God asked the woman, "How could you do such a thing?" "The serpent tricked me," she replied. "That's why I ate it." 14So the LORD God said to the serpent, "Because you have done this, you will be punished. You are singled out from all the domestic and wild animals of the whole earth to be cursed. You will grovel in the dust as long as you live, crawling along on your belly. 15From now on, you and the woman will be enemies, and your offspring and her offspring will be enemies. He will crush your head, and you will strike his heel." 16Then he said to the woman, "You will bear children with intense pain and suffering. And though your desire will be for your husband, he will be your master." 17And to Adam he said, "Because you listened to your wife and ate the fruit I told you not to eat, I have placed a curse on the ground. All your life you will struggle to scratch a living from it. 18It will grow thorns and thistles for you, though you will eat of its grains. 19All your life you will sweat to produce food, until your dying day. Then you will return to the ground from which you came. For you were made from dust, and to the dust you will return." Genesis 3:11b-19 NLT

In essence the creator loudly proclaims that our birth, our life, our redemption and our death will all be grown in the fertile soil of pain. Pain is part of the curse of the beginnings. Pain, real pain, is still very much a part of this veil of tears.
Yet our great God has even molded pain for our ultimate benefit. The thought that pain is a grace of God is hard to swallow. We long for relief, we consume, we numb and we insulate ourselves from the possibility of suffering. The fear of prolonged agony often warps our realty and we salve our conscience into believing that the abatement of pain at any cost is a prudent and reasonable goal. It’s as if we believe that the curse was meant to banish us from God Himself, so we fight the pain. What if the curse that came as a result of rebellion, was intended for our good? What if, in the new reality, pain is an indicator that the creator still cares for you? Further, what if the lack of pain speaks more of our condition than the searing iron of the ache? Maybe it’s people without pain that truly have been banished from the presence of our caring Father into the desert of comfort? To continue….