I have a bad habit of confusing a comfortable life with a good one. They’re not the same thing, right? Or are they?
When life hurts, how can it be good? That’s got to be a question we all struggle with from time to time, especially if comfort is your ultimate goal, like me. I mean, I’ve spent 1000s of hours believing discomfort was evidence that something has gone wrong with my life, as if it were a curse, or proof God isn’t good after all. If I’m hurting, something is wrong. If someone I love is hurting, something is very wrong. If I’m disappointed, afraid, grieving, lonely, financially stressed, physically miserable, or lying awake at 2:00 in the morning, wondering how everything got so bad, I am not living “the good life,” am I?
Obviously, the good life is happening somewhere else. Probably to someone with better health insurance. But maybe I’ve given pain a job it was never qualified to do. I mean, pain alerts me to a potential problem, I understand that. That’s its job: keeping me safe from danger. But telling me whether my life is good or not has never been its skill set.
And yet I let pain interpret everything. A painful marriage is a bad marriage, right? A struggling child looks like a ruined future for sure. A hurting body is evidence of a life that used to be good and is now destined for the couch. One painful thing gets promoted to editor-in-chief, and suddenly, it gets to write the headline for my entire life.
Maybe that’s why I’m not just afraid of suffering because suffering hurts. I’m afraid of what I think suffering means about my life. If suffering has the power to declare my life bad, of course, I want to avoid it.
Pain is a verdict in the courtroom of my life. Guilty! And once I believe that, I have, what seems to me, a very good reason to spend enormous amounts of energy making sure pain goes away for good and never comes again.
And I do that through the power of anxiety. Finally, she has a job, telling me what to do! Anxiety speaks, and I’m all ears: “Suffer now so you won’t have to suffer later!”
Genius! I’m in!
Everyone knows that if you worry about your health before there’s even a diagnosis, you’ve beat pain to the punch. Imagine your financial ruin while the lights are still on and the water still runs, and maybe, just maybe, you can be prepared just in case you lose it all. If you rehearse rejection before anyone rejects you, you’ve gotten ahead of the problem and potentially avoided the pain.
So helpful, and yet so not doing what it promises to do.
They say, “If you worry about something and it happens, you’ve suffered twice.” That gives worry too much credit. The first suffering can last weeks, months, or even years. And the second might not even happen at all. So what I’ve really done is trade the possibility of suffering later for the certainty of suffering now. That's like buying a plane ticket for a trip I don’t actually want to take, just in case someone eventually makes me go. Ah, preparation!
I literally sacrifice days of a perfectly real life to avoid the possibility of living an imaginary one. All because I have been led to believe that if something painful happens, my life will no longer be good.
All because I like emotional unanimity. I would prefer the whole day to vote on whether we’re happy or sad. If something terrible might happen, then nobody is allowed to enjoy anything that comes before that eventuality.
Unfortunately, almost everything that makes for a good life has the ability to hurt you, if not a guarantee. Love, and your heart is gonna get broken. Grow, and you’ll never be the same.
Remove the possibility of pain, and you don’t get a better life; you just get a smaller one. That’s the payout anxiety never put in the brochure: “I will take you to fewer and fewer places, where you will do less and less.”
A good life isn’t a life that I have successfully removed all pain from. It’s a life where I’ve learned to deny pain the authority to define me.
This is hard to say, but if I don’t say it, I’ll never believe it: Something in my life can hurt terribly, and my life can still be good.” Agree or disagree?
Anxiety people?
Thoughts?
Does that make your stomach churn?
Why does it seem like worry is so instrumental in stopping pain?
Humans can hurt and still have a good life. Joni Eareckson Tada has spent nearly sixty years in a wheelchair after a diving accident left her quadriplegic at 17. She’s lived with chronic pain, physical dependence, and cancer. She also has a marriage, friendship, art, books, laughter, faith, advocacy, and a lifetime of work that has mattered deeply to other people, and to herself. The pain stayed, but so did the good.
Yet I’ve spent years trying to make sure misery never comes into my life, and in the process, I’ve made my life miserable. Oh, the irony!
My pain needs a budget because my spending is out of control. I spend the pain of worry like it’s free money. I pay for diseases I never get, for disasters that never happen, and losses I actually win. I’m like a Vegas high roller who just discovered the house will give me credit, and I’m all in. But if pain is gonna cost me something, I’d at least like to make it a wise investment and not a gamble.
Maybe faith is refusing to pay tomorrow’s pain today. Not because tomorrow is guaranteed to be pain-free, but because I’ve only been given enough strength for today. Worry keeps asking me to live on credit, borrowing strength from a future I haven’t been given the resources to live yet. I just keep putting tomorrow on credit, as if paying enough pain up front means I won’t owe anything when tomorrow gets here.
It hasn’t been a great financial strategy, has it?
If a pain-free life isn’t actually one of my options, then maybe the goal isn’t to spend my life trying to get one. Maybe I have a different choice to make: which pain am I willing to risk for something worth having?
Maybe the question isn’t, “How can I avoid hurting?” Maybe it’s, “What’s worth hurting for?”