Enjoy Your Training Without All the Drama

5/14/2024

Minus the noise… Can you grasp that any difficulty or complication, any pain or confusion, any failure or success… is just part of your training? Can you grasp that and accept it without all the drama?

Everyone feels pain. And everyone’s flesh has some tendency to run toward something other than Jesus, some flesh mechanism to cope with the pain—whether a “fight or flight” or “check out” or get mad or cry or whine or run to their “happy place” or “comfort zone” or “feel good pacifier”… (fill in the blank) with your temptation that is anything less than the full stature of Christ.

So, what are you going to do when the going gets tough and the pain seems like “too much” or you feel “backed in a corner”? Do you have a “limit” as to just how much you will “take” or “endure” for Jesus?

Enduring With No Limits

Below is a conversation that happened after a young lady went through a very painful experience. She saw some things about herself and asked some questions on how to be different in the future.

I can see this pattern of having a “max” of how much pain I will go through. I have a “limit” and when I reach it I shut down or check out.

That sounds like you think you have no choice as if you are a victim of it, when you aren’t.

I don’t want to see myself as a victim. I don’t want that to ever happen again. I don’t want to be afraid of it happening again because I don’t believe it should happen.

It’s not going to “happen” to you. It will be a choice of yours whether you decide to shut down or not. You’re not the only person who has ever had to face that type of pain. You aren’t unique in that way. Your shutting down is a hiding place that you have trained yourself to go.

I can think of one person who when he was a little boy, anytime there was any noise in his house growing up, any conflict of any kind, he’d just run to his room and lock the door. Because he wanted absolutely nothing to do with ever hearing it, or thinking about it, or participating, or solving the problem. He was just going to run. Run, lock the door.

Now that you know this about yourself... that you “max out” at 90% and choose to shut down. So now that you know that about yourself, it shouldn’t come as a surprise anymore. Now you’re going to have to make a decision, that under no circumstances are you going to shut down...

What if in your shutting down/hiding would have resulted in the death of your small child? Would it have been worth it to “check out” if it would have hurt him? I think if you knew that your checking out or running away from the pain would have brought harm to your small child, then you would have FOUND A WAY to NOT do it.

If you were alone in the house with your child and you started feeling your max stress level, would you really “check out” and run and hide and leave your child alone risking him running out into the street and getting hit by a car? I think you would find a way to NOT “disappear” and check out. You would find a way to keep him safe. So, you can control it.

So you are going to have to make it “off limits” to shut down like you did. And it might feel like biological “brain” things are happening to you with it all, but it is not brought on by biology. It is brought on by your choice. So, you are going to have to resolve “No hiding place. I will not go there.”

I know that is the Stature of Jesus and is completely possible.

You have to be willing to play the game all the way through, and not just quit when it looks like there’s stress.

When you’re running a race with six people, and you’re a step behind one or two of them... do you just say, “Well, why run at all then?” And then quit? Do you do that, or do you run through the tape? You better learn to run through the tape. Maybe you catch one of them or both of them, but you give it more not less.

Everyone has some similar mechanism of how they are tempted to “cope” with pain. It might not be “checking out” but it might be crying too much, whining too much, creating self-centered drama, getting mad, lashing out, finding a feel-good pacifier or “happy place”, ____. Whatever someone’s “flesh mechanism” to cope is, they have to decide that’s not right if they want to follow Jesus.

One time when I was talking to my husband and some others about it, they asked me, “What are you holding on to?” At first I didn’t get what they were asking me. I didn’t feel like I was holding anything back from Jesus or holding on to anything. But, after considering it a little more, I realized the thing I was holding on to was feeling like “I deserve help.” After that time I started letting go of that thought that I had a “right” to be helped. Interestingly, things have been easier since then, not harder.

If I may speak for her, she has a lot of guilt for how she handled that situation as she compares herself to others. She can see that she fell short. How can she handle that guilt that it happened and fear that it might happen again?

You can have a determination to give a gift to God.

(And here is where you get a peek into what this woman’s pain was—birthing a new life.)

Bearing Fruit Involves Difficulty—Embrace It

You don’t want to miss the beginning of a new soldier in Jesus’ army because you checked out. You don’t want to miss that! The reward of delivering into Jesus’ hands a potential new soldier for His army is well worth the pain. And pain is a very temporary thing. Don’t miss this gift by giving up at the last minute. Don’t miss the best gift part!

In some ways the greater the magnitude of the pain, the greater the opportunity to give a good gift to Jesus. I’m not pretending it’s easy or trivializing it, but I do know it’s part of God’s plan that you have a chance to give a gift to Him. Last time you had a chance you backed away from that.

There’s reward on the other side of having given Him a good gift with your eyes wide open. There’s a lot of joy in that. Don’t miss it. You wouldn’t have the energy to do a fist pump for a little while, but that’s what you’ll feel. Don’t miss the beauty of that moment with Jesus because you checked out, or hid, or lashed out, or grabbed pain-killer. Choose to be there. To face the pain all the way to the end and be there. 

I hope I’ll get another chance.

You will. And I know you’ll do great.

The training process is part of the joy-that difficult beginning that God Himself Designed. He designed that we have difficult beginnings. It’s right there in Genesis. And so you embrace that part, you endure that part with joy. Make them wonder why you’re smiling. And that is the beginning of this whole journey of being able to form a new weapon for God. 

Surrender to the Pain

After it happened, I said something like “Other people are just stronger than me.” And a friend told me, “It’s not about being strong. It’s about being surrendered to the pain.” And looking back I can see that I blew it because I was doing the “sheer grit” thing at first. But when it got too hard, I quit because I wasn’t surrendered to the pain and just being ok with it hurting.

Yes. Surrender to the pain. “To lose your life in order to find it”-That sounds like something you’re letting go of, right? To “lose it”-that was an odd choice of words for Jesus. He could have said something a little more violent and more determined and all of that. But “losing it” is rather passive. 

To “lose” my life means it is so far gone I don’t even know where it went.

Surrender to the pain voluntarily, willingly, and without limits, with the endless commitment of Love. No one is “ready," but everyone walking with Jesus is refined into His heart in the Journey.

Pain is not "baaad" and IS part of training. To try to circumvent that is disobedient to His Will in the matter.

No place else on earth but in Christianity will you understand the mind of God and the place of suffering as being a friend to you… not an enemy. The whole flow of how God does His business involves cycles of suffering and cycles of choices that God has sovereignly made, and it involves our willingness to be obedient to Him. If Jesus can suffer and be enlarged by it and be equipped by it and be brought into supernatural resurrection power by it—why not us? Why would we fight it? Why would we kick and scratch and scream? It’s hard to kick at the goads anyway. We’re not going to be happy when we’re fighting God, having clenched fists and fussing and fuming.

So, change your thoughts to embrace God’s way of equipping you in supernatural ways. No whining about it or backing away from it or trying to "put it out of your mind.” The way to find God isn’t to steel yourself to it or resist it. That isn’t the way to find God. Few will be those who find this supernatural Quality of Life. But, there is no reason we can’t all be amongst those few. We can choose to have the right attitude, for Jesus’ sake, and to bless the nations.

Shine, Jesus, Shine

•  Just Part of the Training