Pain Is Inevitable, Suffering Is Optional

Let me start by saying that this post is a generalization.  I have no intention of minimizing anyone’s pain.  I am in no position to do so.  Also, I am aware that I need to continually put in the work to listen to and practice everything I say in these videos.  That being said, because I have found value in this perspective and so I offer it to others who may benefit from it.  If it doesn’t speak to you, feel free to ignore its existence.  That being said and without further ado I ask you…

Have you ever found yourself sitting in a room alone thinking about everything you’ve been through and trying to make sense of the pain in your life? I know I have a few times in my life and I know many other people who have as well (Probably everyone I’ve ever met).  For a long time, I had this ability to just let things be what they were.  I didn’t let myself stress too much or worry too much because I really didn’t want me to let myself live through the pain more than once.  I didn’t even like telling people what I was going through because I observed that people had an uncanny ability to make up terrible stories about whatever I shared.  As I tried to process things, I found that telling certain people only made it worse.  Later I would have to talk myself out of the stories that my mind came up with in addition to the stories other people made up.  So I decided to not tell myself stories about what my pains meant or the stories the other people told me about what they thought my pain meant or what their own pain meant.

Unfortunately, this ability frustrated many people who tried to deal with me.  But enough stories.  Here’s what you need to know.  We can choose the stories we tell ourselves about our pain.  If we tell terrible stories things can get worse.  If we tell better stories, things can get better.  But the best way I’ve experienced, is to consider God’s story of who we are.  I am not going to pretend that the stories will make the pain go away–only that it has the potential to transform how you experience the pain that inevitably comes.  If you doubt this potential, I simply invite you to pick some pain that has been haunting you or that you fear could haunt you in the future and just tell yourself a good story about it.  If it helps and you are disciplined enough, write the story down.  Then check in on your feelings after telling yourself this new story and see how you feel.  I’d love to hear your comments if you’re willing to share.  In the meantime, I will keep telling myself the story that transforms how I experience pain–we are all God’s children and everything we experience has the potential to lead us back to an awesome reality that we cannot even fathom from here.

The Right Way to Get to the Wrong Place

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in life, it is that we all live with the tendency to tell ourselves stories about who we are and who other people are.  The stories are defense mechanisms designed to protect us from getting hurt and to control our environment in order to get out of it what we think we need.  As a result, when we come into contact with others, it is rarely an authentic encounter, but rather an interaction with a thought or idea in our head.  The people we meet just become characters in our fictions. Depending on how unsafe we feel is the degree to which our parents, significant others, our children, pets, etc. all become characters that we write and rewrite in our minds.  If they are characters in our minds that we are creating, then we can anticipate their actions, create reasonable expectations, and bolster our own sense of safety.  But the fact is that none of us ever meet the same person twice.  Crazier still, none of us are the same person from moment to moment.  The story we tell ourselves about ourselves that makes us look like a consistent being is also fiction.  In reality we are all over the place (in more ways than you might be able to willing to comprehend right now).  The way we create the illusion of consistency is by retelling the stories we created about ourselves and others.  It is similar to following directions to get to a place.  Directions are nothing more than a story of how to get from one place to another.  The first few you go to a place you’ve never been, you might fully engage in the story, because your fear of getting lost overcomes your desire to control the story. But once you know how to get there, do you really keep paying attention to the details?  Most of us don’t.  What matters is getting to the destination.  When the risk of getting lost is minimized, that part of us that pays attention to details tends to follow suit.

Here’s a way to put it in perspective. Would you ever use your GPS (if you have one) or take down directions to get to a place you’ve been to before?  Why would you?  Well the only reasons I would still use it would be if I had not been to the place enough times to be certain I knew where it was; if the route was so complicated that I wanted a little insurance that I would get there; or if the route I usually took was congested and I needed a detour.  Otherwise, I would just trust myself that I knew how to get there based on past experience.  If I was confident enough in my knowledge, I’d probably use the part of my brain normally used for navigation to listen to an audiobook, talk on the phone, daydream, etc.  For example when I’m driving home from work or church or something, I’m so used to the route that it almost feels like I just appear at the house.  I rarely have any recollection of the drive at all.  Scary huh?  But do you remember all your drives home from work?  Of course not.  Our brains are designed that way.  Once it master’s something it becomes as easy as breathing for most people and then we don’t really think about them anymore.  Blah blah blah.  But that’s not my point.  My main point is that when you know something you no longer need directions.  It’s a great thing, but then again, it can be a dangerous thing too because we have a tendency to make assumptions based on our limited pool of knowledge. And that, in my opinion, is what leads us to getting lost in so many other areas in our lives.  We stop paying attention as soon as we think we don’t have to.

For example, I was in the car on my way to an area I thought I had been to before.  The other person in the car also thought that they had been to the same place.  However, unbeknownst to us we were thinking of two different places.  As a result, we also thought the quickest route to the place was different. So we used the GPS to settle it.  Because the two places we were thinking of were close to each other, when the GPS told us to take one route over the other we just assumed that the route times were so similar that the GPS couldn’t tell the miniscule difference.  It wasn’t until we go to the general area and the GPS told us to take a right where one of us was thinking a left that any confusion started.  Now what we could have done in this instance was to trust the GPS and go where it led.  But instead we went the way that the other person was certain was right and I didn’t really protest because I figured they must know something that I didn’t because I had never been to the actual place; only the area where the place was supposed to be.  So after taking the left, the GPS proceeded to tell us to make a U-turn.  Instead of listening to the GPS, we just assumed the GPS was wrong and kept going on the guidance of the other person’s prior experience.  Fortunately when the GPS kept protesting, we were wise enough to call someone who was already at the destination.  That person then proceeded to give us the same directions as the GPS.  It was then that the person I was with realized that they had made an honest mistake.  They were going the right way to the wrong place.  They did not assume that two so similar establishments would be so close to each other that they never really looked closely at the address.

Obviously, this situation was no big deal.  All we had to do was trust the person who was already there and we were back on track.  That’s real easy to do for something as simple as directions, but what do we do in other areas of our lives when we think we have it figured out based on past experience.  Do we zombie out like I do on the way home from a familiar place?  Do we cultivate the ability to be able to discern when we need guidance from elsewhere as well as the humility to receive and apply that guidance?  Do we subject ourselves to the instruction of one who is already there and go where they lead?  Ultimately the decision is ours alone.  Each decision has its merits depending on the situation.  Just be mindful that while it might be safe to assume in many situations, it is not always the wisest or most direct route to where we hope to be.