Something about Pain

Hi guys, Fred here. Hope you are well and thanks for the feedback over some of the earlier Cross Purposes.

Something about pain
I came across the little snippet below in the Spring 05 issue of “Leadership” which is put out 4 times a year by “Christianity Today” in the States. It’s well worth a read.

Girl feels no pain
Ashlyn Blocker’s parents and kindergarten teachers all describe her the same way: fearless. She is fearless because she can feel no pain.
In the school cafeteria, teachers put ice in 5-year-old Ashlyn’s chilli, because even though her lunch is scalding hot, she’ll gulp it down anyway. Ashlyn has chewed through her tongue while eating, and once tore the flesh off her finger after putting the finger into her mouth.
Ashlyn is among a tiny number of people in the world known to have congenital insensitivity to pain. She suffers from anhidrosis, or CIPA – a rare genetic disorder that makes her unable to feel pain.
Family photos reveal a series of these self-inflicted injuries. One picture shows Ashlyn in her Christmas dress, hair neatly coifed, with a swollen lip, missing teeth, puffy eye, and athletic tape wrapped around her hands to protect them. She smiles like a little boxer who won a prize bout.
Tara Blocker, Ashlyn’s mother, says, “Pain’s there for a reason. It lets your body know something’s wrong and it needs to be fixed. I’d give anything for her to feel pain”.
Source: “Girl with Rare Disease Doesn’t Know Pain”, CNN.com (11/1/04)

That last comment by the mother touched something deep in me.

“I’d give anything for her to feel pain”.

It’s sort of countercultural, isn’t it? Here we are in a society that spends millions on taking pain out of our lives and here’s a mum who’s praying for her daughter to know what pain is.

All of that got me thinking about God and our pain! When it comes to God and His things we’re not much different from Ashlyn Blocker. Her problem is physical. Ours is spiritual. We are often “dead” in our responses to our own selfishness, and “dead” to the injustices around us. We are “immunised in conscience” or “deformed in conscience” so that we are unaware how we are destroying our own lives with our distorted thinking and unhealthy / unholy behaviours.

And our heavenly Father grieves the deadness! And sends his Son into that deadness, that nothingness, that place away from him, where there is no response to God – into death itself.

His gift is life – including the “sensing of pain” restored to our hearts – the gift of knowing when something is wrong / when something is destroying us. It’s with that new sensitivity that we are finally reachable and teachable.

I guess the truth is that without Jesus Christ our consciences must be our guide, but they are not reliable in the things of God. When our consciences are no longer de-formed by our fallenness, but re-formed because they are informed by the Word, especially Jesus Christ – well then we reveal the glory of God in our sensitivity!

Be Blessed guys.

I’ve got to run

- Pastor Fred

PS
Aboriginal Preference
The first female aboriginal bishop in the Anglican Church was apparently quoted as saying the following not long ago;

“It’s a shame the Garden of Eden wasn’t in Australia as a lot of trouble could have been avoided – the Aboriginal Adam and Eve would have eaten the snake in preference to the Apple!”