It's been said that God allows adversity in our life to get our attention. Is that positive? In Celebrate Recovery we say that our openness to change increases as our pain increases. Is that positive?
Pain. Sometimes undeserved - oft times self inflicted in my case.
I have been thinking about some pain I had last year that is now making my life oddly less painful. The economy skidded to an abrupt halt. We were alright for a while and then we began to feel the pinch. The pinch turned into a giant vice from hell - so it seemed.
This vendor was great for a while and then it turned over to corporate for faster collection. Despite my payments - it was not enough. They said they were being slow paid or not paid at all nation wide and they were ,pulling out all the stops to collect.
The squeeze was on.
I asked for an agreement. They said they would on their terms. They wanted a ridiculous amount per month for just a few months. They gave me no choice if I wanted to keep it out of collections. I reluctantly agreed.
I hated the pain. Come on God! I'm living right! I have no unconfessed sin in my life!!! Can I get a freakin' break? I'm working the "program" here!
Then I settled down and talked with a few trusted friends. Not much they said helped. Great. This could greatly impact our ability to do business in a small town.
So I simply turned it over to God. I had a problem. I was powerless to do any thing about....sound familiar? But I did. I gave it to God. As a matter of fact I gave the whole business to God. Maybe it was time for a change. I did not care if God would guide me. I simply (Step 3) "Made a decision to turn our lives and our wills over to the care of God".
Somehow we have made the enormous payments. No way this is happening. We are still operating and paying all our bills AND we are paying this huge amount every month. It is not possible in this economy.
God must want this business going for now. It has been difficult. But I have learned something rather interesting and life-changing through all this pain. I believe my heavenly Father has allowed it to show me a lesson about about operating capital. It seemed that we never had enough. We just kept getting some capitol and then had to spend it. What was the end of this maddening cycle?
I learned that in a bad economy we could cut spending, tighten every belt and "put away" adequate sums of money for operating capital and margin. Of coarse, I gave the surplus to my vendor. But I proved that even in the leanest of times it could still be done over and above our daily expenses.
How much more could be put away in times of good economy?
Pain. Got my attention.
3 comments:
I truley believe that without pain there can be no growth in most areas of life. I guess you could say that there's no pain in reading and learning and that's definately growth but it's still painfull or at least a struggle for me.
The crazy thing is that every good thing that has come my way there has been much pain atached.
The good thing is pain is necessary, misery is optional. God bless the pain.
The pain i experienced after the first year we moved here was, like you said, self-inflicted... but wow... so necessary. Where would i be had i not felt the pain? Well, i know one thing is clear. i wouldn't be in CR, which means i wouldn't be in what i call this revival of transparency in my life. It's like one Christian comedian's mantra... "i'm not ok, you're not ok, but that's ok. God loves us anyway." Cheesy and cliche? Maybe, but the idea has all new meaning in my life... all brought to life by the seeds of pain. Another somewhat scary, but mostly exciting thought is... What other pain can i learn through? What other pain does God have in store to teach me a lesson that i could never learn any other way? Scary but exciting.
For years and years I equated pain to punishment. Somehow I thought that I had committed so horrible sin that made me deserve all the pain in my life. It wasn't until my introduction to powerless that I was able to first realize that these circumstances where way beyond my control. Sure I'm guilty of many sins, but Jesus died for all of them not just a few. I was able to realize that there was no quota for his forgiveness (this of-course does not give me the permision to live in sin), but it made me come to the realization that no matter how colorful my past had been now was the time to admit my powerlessness and turn to follow Christ. Nowadays I'm prepared to handle the pain because the one thing I can say with most certainty is that Greater is He that is within me than he who is in the world! I completely agree with the brother who said pain is necessary but misery is optional.
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