The Tipping Point of Pain

Not too many days go by without me receiving a message from someone through social media or through my website about how to navigate present adversity in their lives.  
Not only is it an honor that they trust me with their plights, but my way of honoring them back is by humbly offering them my personal pain insights. For the record, you don’t learn ministry through a textbook or curriculum. Rather, you learn it through being personally in touch with brokenness.
Each time I read pain-soaked words, it reinforces that pain has no bias. It is not bent toward one type of person or family over another. Pain does not pre-judge; pain simply becomes pain when it’s felt.
I know a lot about mental pain and how to decipher its sensation through personal experience. Not because I am someone strong, but because I’ve reconciled pains tipping point.
Pain teeters inside like a spinning toy – causing nausea and confusion – spiraling its distress with every turn; until we decide to stop watching it spin within by changing our focus to a fixed point without.
Staying pain-centered keeps us out of control internally, where our concentration on the pain only magnifies its turmoil.
I try to minister to those who write to me about pain management by letting them know regardless of where the pain emanates – physically, mentally, emotionally, or spiritually – it doesn’t make you weak or less than human.
Pain exposes our fragile humanity in this fallen world.  Oddly, it can be that very ache that is produced in the deepest part of our wounded souls that give us a greater thirst for a taste of heaven on earth. 
Our longing for peace in the midst of the storm lends to us a fuller reality that all of this inner turmoil can only be fully quenched after we leave this earth.
But while on this finite earth, the pain must be the reason you seek a fixed position, lest you go topsy-turvy by spinning with the pain instead of pushing the pain over. Not pushing it down, but pushing it out.
Ask any mother about her relief in childbirth. It doesn’t come until the pain is pushed through and the baby is pushed out. The arrival of joy, personified in person. The true tipping point.
Regardless of what we’re facing, we too can have the arrival of joy from pain.  And it is also personified in a Person. However, this joy only comes when your central focus becomes the Person of Jesus Christ. 
His Presence alone balances out our pain and transitions it to endurance, hope, passion, and purpose. But you must be the one that determines to push it out – to let Him in. 
The tipping point, therefore, is the point that you admit your weakness in pain and the point where Jesus meets you with His strength in your pain.
Thus, the prerequisite to true joy in Christ is feeling pain in this life. Pain is human, but joy is divine. “Do not sorrow, for the joy of the Lord is your strength.” (Nehemiah 8:10).
I know this not by theory or empty rhetoric but by actually living it out and gaining all the necessary tools to manage pain through the personal relationship of faith, hope, and love in Jesus Christ.  It is with that passion and knowledge I present my encouragement.
“And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes; there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying.  There shall be no more pain, for the former things have passed away” (Revelation 21:4).
Maher is the teaching pastor at Coastal Christian Ocean City, and is president of Soldiers for Faith Ministries. Social Media and website: @TruthOverTrend