Don't Get So Used to Pain:
Strive for an Abundant Life Instead!
Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. 2 Cor 5:17
During my second pregnancy, something strange happened to my intestine, and I began to have a hard time being comfortable around food in general. I ended up hoping it would go away as soon as the baby came, but it didn't and I have spent the last six years struggling to digest my meals propertly. For the last six years, I have been having to use the bathroom way more times than I would like to admit.
I tried different things at the time, like cutting off derry products, then progressing to gluten, for about a month each. Because my symptoms were way simpler then, I also noticed very little effect and decided not to follow through with it.
At the time I learned that if I added probiotics, glutamine and all sorts of different vitamins, I could still live well with my little issue, making sure I would always feel health despite this new challenging struggle.
But the issue was still there.
Today, exactly six years later, it’s been two months since I dropped gluten for good, and for about a month I have started to feel better. I still struggle but in general, feeling better seems like an excellent trade! I tried going back to gluten the other day just to see if it would make a difference, and guess what? The pain and discomfort came back straight away — a discomfort I know very well, after all I had been living with it for a long time. That was when I first realized that for all those years I wasted a lot of my health not noticing how I felt anymore.
This whole situation made me think about how sometimes we live our lives just like that: coping with pain, or if we're being more honest with sin itself, because we got so used to it. We know God has made us into new creation, but we live as if we were still the old one. It could be because we had to, or because we didn’t know any better. It could also be because we didn’t have the time to make a change or even because nobody else out there stopped to listen or share valuable advice.
One way or the other I believe there is a moment, and it is different for all of us, when we make a choice about making room for that pain to stay or not. And when we do, we also get used to having it around us all the time. We all know we will have afflictions in this life, yet the Bible says you and I ought to live in joy knowing Christ has overcome all affliction. So why are we still okay with lingering our ways through pain?
It might be because we have gotten used to not forgiving someone, or even lost while grieving our own losses. Perhaps we lett fear take over at some point, or our pain is a someone, and we just don't know how to walk away from them. Maybe we haven't yet aloud ourselves to name our pain, whatever it may be, and we never trully gave that to Him.
Whatever it is, I pray this week you can cut off your own "gluten", that one component that might need to stay away for longer or even for good, so you can go back to functioning well. I pray you can live as the new creation you were made to be. I pray you can name your pain and sin and give them to Jesus, realizing there needs to be more of Him where you hurt the most — and there is only space for Him where we start making cuts from all of the stuff that is taking His place.
