The pain medication fell behind the power curve. As I sat with him in his hospital room, my friend, who recently had surgery, tried to describe the pain to me. He said, “I came to see this hospital bed as the hand of God. I am actually resting in God’s hand. He will not let me go.”
When exactly does pain end? Have we ever wondered? In the worst agony, we may think suffering is endless. Jeremiah reminds us that pain has an ending point for believers. “No one is cast off by the Lord forever.” God’s compassion ultimately sets the time limit on our pain. Our struggles will falter before his unfailing love.
In our broken world, we may mistakenly think that God wants us to feel this hurt. Jeremiah clarifies. God does not will for us to experience unending grief. Ultimately, his presence prevails over our pain. Our patience may fail, but his love never will.
My friend told me how he survived his pain. Lying there in the hand of God, he embraced the pain as a shaft of light and felt God was helping him to hug the pain. He suffered greatly in those days, but he never suffered alone. God held him and helped him to overcome his pain. This is what our God does.
One painful night I awakened and opened a book on my desk. There I found these words by Lady Julian of Norwich: This is what God prays over his children when they cannot sleep: “All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.”
