Thursday, March 10, 2016

The Pain of Recovery


Bishop Jakes said, "Sometimes the pain of recovery can hurt worse than the pain of the injury."
He ain't nevva lied on that one. The healing process can be deceiving because the healing can be so painful that it makes you think that the opposite is happening. But the Lord has had to remind me of something He said to me years ago, "The whole time you're hurting, you're healing. Whatever is squeezing you, squeeze it back until you squeeze your blessing out of it". Like in childbirth, it's not easy to bear down on the same pain that's so unbearable. But you've got a baby in there trying to come out. The pain means, HE/SHE IS COMING! So you have to COOPERATE with the pain, TEAM UP with the pain, in order to birth what's in you trying desperately to get out and that the enemy is trying just as desperately to kill before it gets out.

It's not so much YOU that he's trying to kill. It's what's IN you. I'm reminded of Job when the devil went to God for permission to attack him. God told him, "Just don't touch his LIFE". In other words, you can kill everybody close to him. Kill everything that belongs to him. But you CAN'T KILL HIM. 

It's the same with you and I. He's not trying to kill YOU, because He knows He can't get that kind of permission from God. Honestly, he doesn't have as much a problem with you being alive as he does with you being effective, productive, relevant, encouraged. So if he can kill what's IN you, your drive, determination, passion and your very faith, by killing everything around you, what belongs to you, getting in as many relationships as possible and killing those, that's what he's after anyway. He wants to convince you that you are left with nothing to live for, and he wants you to blame God for it. 

What did Job's wife say to him? That it would be better for him to CURSE GOD and DIE. Why not just die? Because the enemy didn't go to God and tell him that if he allowed him to take away everything from him he would die. He said he would curse God. THAT'S what that whole book was about, getting Job, or trying to get Job to curse God. But Job passed the test. Yes, he cursed the day he was born, but that brother didn't curse his GOD. Instead he BLESSED HIM. Even when the ONE person close to him who survived all the calamities, was the one who offered the so called solution to his problem: Curse God and die. Even when his friends came and sat with him and pretty much accused him of being unrighteous, or hiding some kind of sin which brought all this upon himself. He passed the test. With all they claimed to know about God, they didn't know that sometimes God will turn the devil loose on you. They didn't know that some storms of life, some trials can't be rebuked away because even though they came from the devil, they came with God's specific signature of approval and instructions. They didn't understand that sometimes, some things only happen so that God will have a stage on which to perform. Even with a bit of rebuke from God like, "Hold on Job. Who you think you talkin to bruh?", he still passed the test. Because he didn't curse his HELP. The Lord Himself became Job's "cheat sheet", and helped him to NOT do the very thing that satan wanted him to do. With the passing of the test came double everything he'd lost.

But don't think that in the mean time Job didn't have to go through the healing. Those sores had to HEAL. The bible doesn't talk about "immediately" or "straightway" his sores were healed. So it's safe to believe that his physical healing was a process. A painful, uncomfortable, inconvenient, itchy (because when sores heal they ITCH) process. The twice as many cattle didn't just magically appear. He had to start somewhere and mate animals and wait for them to be birthed, with each mama animal experiencing the discomfort of those births.

Somebody had to give birth to all those children who replaced the ones he lost. Nobody carried all of those babies at once. Unless there was a multiple birth in there somewhere, each of those babies was carried separately, birthed individually, each with their own pain to the mom.

I've never really known of a preacher/teacher who likes to talk about Job.  There seems to always be this behind-the-scenes fear that if they preach about him they'll end up suffering on another level because of it. But we're so silly. We're suffering anyway! A brother like Job can help us to understand better what's happening, and why it's REALLY happening and the kind of outcome we can look forward to.

There's something about the severity of pain that can distract you to the point of blindness and deafness, where you can't see the hand of God in the situation, or hear Him as clearly as you would without the pain. But by the time that same pain begins to subside, it can also HELP you see and hear God more clearly than you would have without the pain. Imagine that! There's something about the severity of pain that will make you go from cursing the day you(or someone else) were born to being eternally thankful and grateful that God saw fit collaborate with the devil to rip your heart out.  But you have to past the tests first, and there are two of them: The pain of the injury, AND the pain of recovery.


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