Just Make it Stop

Lately I have been driven to the point in pain where I cry out (inside anyway) "Just make it stop". This is a very bad place. When our lives get consumed with any one thing (other than living life with God, who is three in one, so you never ever really have only one thing with God) stuff happens.

The stuff that I am thinking about is what we do when we are fully self focused. I think most of us know how we live when we are about 75% self focused. For Americans this is our everyday style of living. But when we start to top out, say around the low 90's, we enter in the "meet my needs now" world. Everyone is different. Some turn to drugs, to TV, to food (food is good),exercise, isolation, talking, controlling things; we all seek to become distracted from the pain. What is your favorite treatment?

I would like to tell you how to become united with God so that you do not feel your pain, but it doesn't work like that. In a weird way (one that you will not understand unless you are a very close friend of God) your pain in an invitation to life in Christ Jesus. It is like Jesus in the garden before the crucifixion. The turmoil and pain that He was to go through was going to be His life. He had to set His face on making it through. To do that He focused on Himself? No, he focused on the will of the Father.

You can tell "how dead" someone is by what they do when someone else messes with their rights. When you have given up your right to life, to a life without pain and suffering, you have given up your life on a whole deeper level. Let me tell you that if you have issues with someone rejecting you, all you need is sever pain in your back, legs, nerves, feet and hips for several days and you will not even be focusing on what others think. Unless of course you have a great storehouse of pride and think that the whole world is about YOU!

If you think what I am telling you is just wrong, you can contact our brothers and sisters around the world and ask them. Contact the men and women who had their hands cuff off for being Christian, the family who has waited 15 years for daddy to get out of prison, The teen girl that was raped by the solider and then required to confront him with forgiveness. All around us, everyday are people who suffer, but with a heart full of worship. They are not unaware of their suffering. The are not delivered from it. They are over comers in the midst of it. These people are saints, my hero's, my prayer partners, my friends.

If you can't give it all up now - give what you can.