The problem with pain

"Pain is unmasked, unmistakable evil; every man knows that something is wrong when he is being hurt… And pain is not only immediately recognizable evil, but evil impossible to ignore. We can rest contentedly in our sins and in our stupidities; and anyone who has watched gluttons shoveling down the most exquisite foods as if they did not know what they were eating, will admit that we can ignore even pleasure. But pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world…"

-C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

Pain is an incredible thing. It's one of the most powerful experiences in our world. It has the ability to cause great distress in the human mind, and at it's core there is a sense of justice not being served, or in even simpler words, that's it just isn't right, or fair. People often either find, or lose their faith in God, over painful events and memories, depending on what they choose to do with it.

People will go to great lengths to avoid pain, which is something I personally relate to a great deal. I spent much of my adult life so far using various things to try and numb painful events from my past.

"We had a plan to build a wall

A great divide that would never fall

To separate us from all the pain

And keep our skeletons locked away

And brick by brick we built it so thick

That it blacked out the sky and all the sunlight

And one by one we all became numb

We were making the bullets to a broken gun"

-Thousand Foot Krutch, Fly on the Wall

This is what is at the core of most addictions. The heartbreaking reality is that the things that mask pain never last. The law of diminishing returns is in full effect in this arena, as the person continues to use something to numb the pain more, the effects go down and they have to use more and more to achieve the desired result. The pain never actually leaves, you can only lock it away for so long before it becomes a festering wound. Out of sight, but not really out of mind.

This is already going to be a long enough post because I am sharing some lengthy material that I find incredibly helpful. I just want to say that this could be an extremely in-depth conversation, so I'm only skimming the surface here. What I want to submit to you is to consider the possibility that perhaps due to many reasons, we have a very skewed view on pain. I would completely agree that pain is not part of God's original plan, but was a consequence of the fall of man and sin entering into the world. I would also say that I do not believe that God causes pain, but rather that he allows it and uses it to achieve his purposes in our lives. I would also argue that God does not like pain anymore than we do. An honest look at Jesus' life and ministry would back this up in my opinion.

One of the most transformational things that I have learned in the last few years, is the realization that God uses our pain and suffering to draw us closer to him, C.S. Lewis said that extremely well in the first quote I shared in this post. The reality is that when everything is great in our lives we often don't believe that we need God and that we can do this all on our own. How then, is he to wake us up out of our delusion? What I would like to leave you with is this last quote from a book I'm reading. Consider the possibility that at the heart of a lot of emotional pain that we experience, are lies that we have internalized at some point about who we are. God often wants to use these painful events to wake us up so that we are in a position where we're willing to seek him and to listen to him, so he can speak truth to those lies and show us who we really are.

"[Transformational Prayer] Principle Four: Since many of the negative emotions we currently feel are reflections of the past, they provide opportunities for the wounds of our lives to be exposed and thus for healing to occur.

It is difficult to address that which has not been identified. God will either allow or orchestrate our surroundings to bring us under duress and testing in order to expose what is our true core belief system (see 1 Pet. 4:12-13). It requires little effort to perform at a high level of "spirituality" when things are going well with us. However, when the fire comes, our impurities are made evident and whatever is on the inside (our true belief system) is made evident. These impurities, falsehoods that we believe, will express themselves through our emotional state and consequential behavior. What we truly believe is made evident through our feelings. As I have already stated, we will feel what we believe. If we choose to follow the smoke trail of our stirred-up emotions back to their original memory source, we may discover the lie-based belief causing the emotional pain. It is here we can find complete freedom from the emotional pain produced by these lies as we receive truth from the Spirit of Christ."

-Dr. Ed Smith, Healing Life's Hurts

Dear Ricky, yes, there is only one God.

Ricky Gervais is a well-known actor and comedian, and I'm definitely a fan of his. He's also pretty outspoken about his atheism and critique of religion. The thing I find the most interesting about this popular argument against God's existence, is that it is self-defeating. This argument attempts to discredit the truth claims of all religions that believe in a god by saying that it is actually the one that holds the truth. All that this argument does is replace other truth claims with another one, but it tries to make itself look better than all the other options by implying it's not doing the very thing it's doing. You can literally turn this argument against itself and say, "There are all these different religions in the world that believe in God, but here you are saying there isn't one. And you think you're right? Right, I'm sure you are. The truth has FINALLY arrived." There is nothing intellectual about just saying "they're wrong and I'm right," it is a position usually loaded with emotionally based views on the world.

At it's heart, the argument here really comes down to one basic question, is God real or not? Of course it is suggesting that no, he isn't, and even subtly implies that religion is ridiculous. Pointing out that there have been many religions from the beginning of time that believed in God but had a different idea about who he is, does not at all act as evidence that God isn't real based on sheer odds alone. Personally I would actually argue the opposite, that if we look at the fact that so many religions believe in God versus belief systems that don't, perhaps they know something even though they can't all be right at the same time on the details. I like how CS Lewis tackles this topic best in his book Mere Christianity when he says:

“If you are a Christian you do not have to believe that all the other religions are simply wrong all through. If you are an atheist you do have to believe that the main point in all the religions of the whole world is simply one huge mistake.”

I agree with Lewis on this issue. In fact, the Bible has talked about humanity's desire to create and follow false gods since the beginning of time. It is therefore no surprise to find thousands of different gods within the world, I would say it's to be expected. To answer this argument's claim directly, yes in fact the God of Christianity has always asserted to be the one true God in a world of false gods, that is an accurate statement.

The world clearly has an origin, and there had to be a cause of that origin, but was it random, or caused by a God? In my own words, Christianity basically says that an honest look at the world itself shows it to be so obvious that the world could not have been randomly created, so that the person has no choice but to accept there is a creator: 

 

"For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse." -‭Romans 1:20 NIV‬

I am by no means minimizing the gravity of a question this significant. The question of whether God is real or not is perhaps the most profound question every human being asks themself at some point in their life. What makes it more complicated for each person is that we tend to base our answer to the question on far more than just what the evidence suggests may be true. We tend to bring all of our personal beliefs about our identity, our emotional baggage, and psychology, into the the decision making process when considering the answer to this question. In order to answer this question, one has to consider many other complex issues, especially evil and suffering in the world, which evokes many strong emotions. We all have a choice to make here though, will we allow the evidence to lead us, or the culture of the time we live in, or our emotions? I wonder if we all have ever fully analyzed what is underneath our beliefs on this issue. If we say we don't believe in God, do we really even know why we assert that claim, underneath all of the surface level reasons we usually default to? If our emotional defenses would have us say there is no God so we can avoid accepting some very hard truths about the world, would we be willing to even accept the possibility that he is real if an honest investigation into the claim would point us to that answer? How much does truth matter to us when it's about the most important question in the world?

CrossCounsel Golf Outing Testimony

I was given an opportunity to share my personal testimony and experience with CrossCounsel International Ministries at their 13th annual Golf Golf Classic fundraiser event, and I was honored to be part of the experience. Below is the transcript of my testimony that I shared at the event:

Shane Buol - CrossCounsel Golf Event Testimony

Hi, my name is Shane and I’ve been coming to CrossCounsel since August of last year. I'd like to share with you a little of my own story, what brought me to CrossCounsel, and what this ministry has done for me.

I had a rough start to life, having young parents who both came from broken homes. I experienced a lot of dysfunction stemming from drug and alcohol abuse in my home, sexual abuse at the hands of a neighbor, and many other things. As a young man I started using various drugs to escape my reality. Thankfully, my parents eventually became Christians and did their best to clean up their lives. This helped to lead me to a place where I was able to accept Jesus as my savior too, although the core issues of my past had at this point still gone unaddressed. During my senior year of high school I was listening to some dark heavy metal music that triggered negative childhood memories and I suddenly realized that what happened to me wasn’t normal, and I sank into a dark depression. I began smoking weed just so I could get to sleep at night, and really just used drugs as much as possible to escape the memories and pain that kept replaying in my mind. I eventually confided in a friend that I was thinking about committing suicide, and he called my parents and told them he was worried about me. My parents quickly got me in for what would be my first counseling experience. Those experiences helped me to move forward without wanting to end my life, but they didn’t address the core feelings I had buried inside.

As an adult I found myself struggling with substance abuse in various forms. Over time I quit drinking alcohol, but traded it for a brief addiction to Adderall, and eventually would again settle on smoking weed as a way to manage my negative emotions for quite a few years. As time went on, I began to realize that this was not a sustainable pattern. In 2018, I had been working long hours at my job, and my mother-in-law passed away from cancer. I believe these events triggered a form of mental breakdown for me. I knew I needed help, so I set out to find a place that could help me sort through my issues. I went through counseling at two different places, which did provide some positive experiences by allowing me a safe place to share and work through painful memories. Neither experience really got to the root of the false beliefs I had internalized though, so I again found myself repeating cycles of past behaviors.

Around this time, I had begun to hear about CrossCounsel through a local men’s group. I began listening to the podcasts regularly and couldn’t deny the power of the testimonies I would hear on there. After experiencing more of the same behavioral patterns and continued use of marijuana to manage my negative emotions, I knew I had more work to do. This time, I set up my first session with CrossCounsel. To date, I have seen results in some form during each session, but I had a profound moment of truth I experienced in one of my sessions late last year. In that session I went to 4 or 5 memories from my childhood, and the Lord showed me that I had felt unsafe in all of them. After that, I felt the Lord tell me that He is safe. The effect this had on me was immediate. Although I had always known in my head that Jesus was safe, I knew that my heart just believed it for the first time as I experienced a peace and warmth that came over me.

In the months that followed, I eventually realized that I no longer had the instinctive reaction to smoke weed when faced with negative emotions, like I had done for years before. I still have other things I need the Lord’s healing for in more sessions to come, but for the first time ever, I feel ok to allow myself to feel negative emotions and not feel like I have to run away. This is a huge victory for me. It was something I tried to do on my own so many times before, only to continue to repeat the same cycle over and over again.

One thing I’ve learned from my time at CrossCounsel is that God’s healing is a two-part process. The Lord is the one who knocks on the door of our heart, but we have to open the door and let Him in. We have to invite him into the darkest corners of our minds, into the places where we often don’t want to go to ourselves. Jesus himself said in Revelation 3:20, “Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with that person, and they with me.” In my story, I could hear God knocking on the door of my heart, but I could not see the door that I needed to open. I could not see how to get to that door due to smoke caused by years of emotional fires burning in my mind and heart that had obscured my vision. CrossCounsel helped direct me to that door. They could not open the door for me, but they helped me to recognize where the knocking was coming from, and how to turn the handle to open the door and let Jesus in. For that, I am extremely grateful.

I’d like to thank everyone here today for your donations and financial support for this life changing ministry. As someone who has personally been in a situation where I knew I was only a session or two away from healing but unable to pay for it on my own, I want to tell you how significant of a gift it is to provide that experience for someone.

Thank you for letting me share my story.

Father's Day reflections, 2024

I want to take a moment to wish a Happy Father's Day to many of the great men that I know. I have been incredibly privileged to have two great men as fathers in my life, both who have been an incredible blessing to me throughout the years. To me it is a true testament of God's love and goodness in seeing how He can bring something great out of something as terrible as a divorce, yet that is part of my family's story.

There is no such thing as a perfect father, except for God himself, but I have been fortunate to know many great fathers outside of my own family too. Several of those men have shared their valuable wisdom with me as I grow as a father myself. I am so thankful for every one of the great men that I know, those who are out there every day fighting to provide for their family and to protect them, and to be an example of love.

To all the fathers I know who are reading this, stay strong and stay in the fight. Don't give up on your family. God's design for family is the best and perfect design. The role of a father and mother cannot be underestimated in their importance in bringing up healthy children. We live in a world now though where Satan is on the frontline, working hard every day to minimize the significance of the man and especially fathers, and to portray us as terrible and unnecessary. It couldn't be further from the truth. Those are all lies from the enemy himself.

As many good fathers as there are out there, there are unfortunately far too many bad fathers also. Those are the men who put their own selfish desires and interests ahead of their family and have sacrificed them for their own selfish gain. Let us show the world what it looks like to be a good father and to imitate God's love for us within our own space and realm of influence. Let us not diminish the significance of living out what we teach our kids, and to be consistent with God's teaching. Our kids, and the world, can spot a hypocrite from a mile away. Let us band together to mutually encourage one another. We all have hard days, we all have struggles, let's be honest with each other and talk about it so we don't fall victim to the traps of the enemy. Let's be the fathers that God has called us to be.

A God after our own hearts

Perfection is not something that God ever expects us to attain here on Earth, yet how many of us expect that of ourselves? Maybe some of us grew up with a critical parent and we project those ideas onto God thinking that every time we fail, He is right there waiting to throw our failures back in our face. An honest reading of the Bible would show us that our God is always willing to forgive us for those failures as long as we are moving towards him in all that we do. When Jesus walked on Earth he made it very clear that the motives of the heart matter far more than actions themselves, but actions usually reveal what's in the heart. This doesn't mean that we get a free pass on what we do, but intentional sin is very different from stumbling along the way. Some of us have tons of baggage that we are still sorting through and it can take a long time to refine our behaviors so they are in line with His purposes. He knows we will fail, He knows we're not perfect.

The Bible is full of examples of people that set their hearts on the Lord, yet stumbled in their walk many times. David is described as having a heart for God, yet struggled with some pretty horrible sins. Once his sin was exposed and he was aware of it he did not make excuses or dwell in it, he simply repented, asked for forgiveness, got back on his feet and started moving towards God again. Peter, one of the most well-known disciples of Jesus, as he was walking on the water towards Jesus began to falter in his faith and to sink beneath the water. His response was to call out to Jesus in his need and ask for help. This same Peter faltered in his faith while Jesus was being interrogated and he denied him three times as Christ said he would. Once he became aware of his behavior, he wept and I believe his heart turned towards Jesus again. Peter went on to be one of the founding members of the Christian Church and to die as a martyr for his faith.

Our God is not sitting and waiting for us to sin so that he can immediately condemn us. He is wanting to change our hearts, and to turn us into the sorts of people that choose Him over and over instead of the fleeting pleasures and sins that the world lives for. He does not expect us to be perfect, but he desires all of our hearts to be given to him completely. There is an enemy who will be there to condemn you every time you sin, and to remind you of your failures over and over, his name is Satan, do not confuse the two.

Come and follow me

Currently, I am reading the book of Acts in the bible, and in particular looking at the conversion of Saul after he has a personal encounter with Jesus. What I am struck by the most is his immediate conversion, how it happened so quick that word couldn't even circulate for people to know ahead of time. This is obvious when we see the reaction of the disciples that he is coming into contact with, because they are initially terrified of him due to his reputation up to that point. Saul was not just any Jewish person, he was a Pharisee and focused heavily on the persecution, and even execution, of the new Christian believers at the time. When Paul met Jesus on the road to Damascus though, everything changed instantly. He literally did a 180 and went from persecuting Christ and His faithful followers, to preaching the good news of the gospel, even to his own detriment. He considered it worth the cost though, in his own words he said, "I consider my life worth nothing to me; my only aim is to finish the race and complete the task the Lord Jesus has given me—the task of testifying to the good news of God’s grace," (Acts 20:24 NIV).

I find it inspiring when I see the stark contrast between Paul's former life, versus his life after he met Jesus. As Christians, we may not all have such opposite circumstances as he did, yet if we follow him faithfully according to His word, I believe that everyone should see a difference in our lives. When we look at how Jesus called his disciples, they all immediately respond to His calling and follow Him, leaving the life they formerly led. This involves a laying down of our own priorities and beliefs, and replacing them with His own. Following Christ comes at a cost, but as Paul pointed out, it is worth everything in the end. If we claim to follow Jesus, but our lives never change, and we look just like the rest of the people living in the world, there is no power in our testimony. The world would be unconvinced of who Jesus is if we just keep on doing what we have always done before, or what everyone else does. If our belief system looks more like what's going on in the world than what God has revealed in His word, I would say we need to look up and we may find that rather than having our eyes on Jesus nailed to the cross, we are following a golden calf of our own creation.

Although we are not saved by works or our deeds, they do still matter. The outward sign of a transformed heart and life should be visible in our actions and how we treat people, which should be in alignment with this faith that we proclaim. In the book of James, it is said that "As the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without deeds is dead," (James 2:26). Many other religions say that we are saved by our works, that hopefully when we die we have done more good than bad things and it will all work out. The bible has much to say on this subject, which is why it stands out as so different compared to other world religions. We are not saved by our works, we are saved by the redeeming work of Jesus Christ, who lived the perfect life that no human being could ever live, and then he offered it as an atoning sacrifice for all of humanity who would accept Him. It is not enough to just say with words though that we believe and accept Jesus.  The person who encounters Jesus and accepts His calling on their life should respond by walking away from the former life, and by striving to do the will of God moving forward. Jesus had this to say about those who do not live according to the faith they proclaim with their mouth only, “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name and in your name drive out demons and in your name perform many miracles?’ Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!’" (Matthew 7:21-23).

Let us strive to put aside the old ways of thinking and living, and aim for the life that God has in mind for us. It is not guaranteed to be an easy life, the bible offers a picture of a hard life actually, likened to "taking up our cross" as Christ himself did. Let us draw inspiration from Paul and others in the bible who experienced God's transforming power, considered the personal cost of following Him, and said yes to His ways instead of their own. In turn, our lives will be transformed as we trust Him to help align our desires and values with His own, and the world should see the difference. Take heart, because he has overcome the world, so get out of the boat, and follow Him. Take up your mat, and walk.

Don't look back

Lately I've been reading through the Old testament again and one thing I'm reflecting on this morning is how many times God had warned his people not to return to a life of sin, and how many times his people chose to not listen. It's easy to take the position of a modern reader looking at the Bible and to yell at the pages, "No! Stop! What's wrong with you guys?!" I know how the story goes, the Bible documents countless times of humanity's constant wavering in their faith and trust in God, and in return getting themselves into terrible situations. But I have to acknowledge, one thing that always strikes me about the Bible is even though many years have passed between these stories and our current time, the Bible tells us "‭What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun," Ecclesiastes 1:9 NIV‬. The same pattern of God redeeming mankind, and eventually man turning away from God to return to the very thing he saved them from, continues to happen regularly today.

I believe there are many reasons for this: arrogance, pride, greed, the list goes on. Another powerful reason that I can personally relate to is when we have unhealed, traumatic memories, that we allow to continue to have power over us. Satan absolutely loves a person who is stuck in the past, because he loves to get in there and poke at the wound and make it hurt again. In our pain, we can sometimes fail to trust in God's goodness and take things into our own hands to try and cope. We can say things like, "God, why won't you take this pain from me?" I believe that this perspective of wanting God to teleport us out of a painful event or memory fails to have a biblical foundation, it's main focus is finding a quick fix for our present situation.

After years of being enslaved by Egypt, God redeemed ancient Israel and promised to bring them into the promised land, a land "flowing with milk and honey." God of course could have teleported Israel right then and there into that land, but instead he led them on a long journey through the desert and wilderness to get there. Many of the ancient Israelites complained against God and longed for their old life, not trusting God in his promises and instead trusting on what they could see with their eyes that could be a "quick fix" to whatever problem was in front of them.

In complete honesty, at various points I have found myself too focused on the pain in front of me and I too have longed for things that God had already freed me from. I have even temporarily returned to some of those things, only to find that in the long run those things actually made things worse for me, just like I remembered. At one point I remember asking God why I had to walk through something very painful that I was going through, and I very clearly felt him tell me, "because you can." At the time it really wasn't the answer that I was looking for, but looking back I can see that I was stronger than I thought I was and that God had equipped me with all that I needed to walk through that point in my life, I just needed to trust him. Several years later from that event now, I can see all of the growth and trust that happened while I was walking through that incredibly difficult period of my life. If God had simply beamed me out of that rough spot and fast forwarded to the future, I would not have grown at all in my faith or in my personal qualities that he is now using for his purposes. 

My question for all of us today is, regardless of where we're at in our walk, are we trusting God at his promise to take us to that same promised land? Or do we find ourselves longing for the things that he has freed us from, looking for a quick fix to our present situation rather than trusting that he is walking alongside of us and will get us to the destination he has promised? God is good, and he will do as he promised, the choice to trust is up to us.