17 Pain & Suffering #1

Our world is filled with broken relationships and loneliness.  Perhaps we should stop and consider how well we even know those we call our friends.  Many of us fall into a trap of superficiality.  Even in cities with millions of people milling around, men and women go through their day without one meaningful interaction or even a single    experience of human touch.  

We all assume that the people around us must have others in their lives, when in reality, the feeling of loneliness grows like a fog over their HEARTS.

Pain—it’s often seen as the great inhibitor, keeping us from happiness.  But I see it as a giver of freedom.

How can comparing physical pain to emotional pain help a suffering person?

Discuss your own “pain history”—has most of your pain come from physical or emotional pain?

As a culture, the U.S. seems poorly designed to equip people for coping with pain.  We quickly silence pain with pills.  From infancy, babies are swaddled in soft blankets and shielded from hard edges.  Central heating and air-conditioning temper the extremes of climate.  Even going barefoot is not allowed in some households.

Do you think this pattern is unhealthy?  Should parents be less concerned with protecting their children from pain and struggle?

Think how your own parents handled this issue in your upbringing.

The most intense pleasure comes from after prolonged struggle.

Think about a time of struggle in your life that pain proved rewarding.  Have you ever experienced real growth apart from pain?

16 HOPE

Next week we will look at pain and suffering, but in preparation for that subject area we need to look at HOPE.


There’s a power in hope that goes beyond explanation.  It lifts us out of the rubble of our failures, our pain, and our fear to rise above what at one point seemed insurmountable.

Imagine that you are in the jungle, lost and alone.  You paused to lace your boot, and when you looked up, no one was near.  You took a chance and went to the right; now you’re wondering if the others went to the left.

Whatever, you are alone.  And you have been alone for, well, you don’t know how long it has been.  Your watch was attached to your pack, and your pack is on the shoulder of the nice guy from New Jersey who volunteered to hold it while you tied your boots.  You didn’t intend for him to walk off with it.  But he did.  And here you are, stuck in the middle of nowhere.

You have a problem.  First, you were not made for this place.  You are out of your element.  What’s worse, you aren’t equipped.  You have no machete. No knife.  No matches.  No flares. No food.  You aren’t equipped, but now you are trapped—and you haven’t a clue how to get out.

Before moving on, let’s pause and ask how you would feel.  Given such circumstances, what emotions would surface?  With what thoughts would you wrestle?  Fear?  Anxiety?  Anger? 

But most of all, what about hopelessness?  No idea where to turn.  No hunch what to do.  Can you freeze frame that emotion for a moment?  Can you sense, for just a second, how it feels to be out of your element?  Out of solutions?  Out of ideas and energy?  Can you imagine, just for a moment, how it feels to be out of hope? 

If you can, you can relate to many people in this world.  For many people, life is—well, a jungle.  Not a jungle of trees and beasts.  But jungles of broken hearts, hospital walls, and divorce courts. 

We’ve imagined the emotions of being lost; now you think you can do the same with being rescued?  What would it take to restore hope?

The answers are abundant, three come quickly to mind.

First would be a person.  Not just any person.  People don’t need someone equally confused.  They need someone who knows the way out.

And from that person they need some vision.  They need someone to lift their spirits.  They need someone to look them in the face and say, “This isn’t the end.  Don’t give up.”

And, perhaps most important, they need direction.  Someone to take them from this place to the right place, then you have someone who can restore their hope.

REFLECTION

Describe a time when you felt hopeless.  What made you feel that way?

What in your life right now threatens your hope?  How will you deal with it?

Why does it take a competent guide to restore hope?

Do you have such a guide? Do you think you can be a guide? Explain

“Where There Is HOPE, There Is Life”

15 Love Part 3

I have friends who have virtually sold their souls hoping to be loved.  Some mask their pain through indifference, but others through false intimacy.  We all long to belong.  We all need to be connected to something bigger than ourselves.  Whether we like it or not, much our self-worth is rooted in how others feel or think about us.  If we belong to no one, we begin to feel that we are worthless.  Because of this, we will do almost anything to belong to someone or to belong to something.

Love is not about how many people we have used, but about how much we have cherished one person.  I’ve come to find over time that players are the ones who are most afraid.  They are afraid to love, and so they make it a game.  They’re terrified of loving deeply, and so they keep everything superficial.  I think deep inside they wonder whether any girl could actually love them if she really knew who he was.

If you really believe you are capable of loving deeply and profoundly, what in the world keeps you from it?

 Is it that your heart so longs for love and longs to love,but you’ve settled for so much less?

Then there are the people who believe in love but do not believe that they are worthy of it.  You find them moving from one destructive relationship to another.  It’s almost impossible to understand why they choose to stay in those relationships.  You can’t talk them out of it.  If you dare say anything about their partners, they are the first to defend them.  They are held hostage by their need for love.  They are made victims because they don’t believe they deserve love, so they settle for whatever they can get.

Human beings fear almost nothing more than being alone.