Over the last four years, despite attempts to lock it away, I have learned that pain does not stay buried. It is patient that way, biding its time, waiting for a reason to flare. So I redoubled my efforts. I banished it to the recesses of my mind, hoping to forget. I tucked it far away in an unmarked corner of my heart, hoping not to feel.
But pain is a persistent prisoner—it finds cracks, it makes fissures. It reappears with the smallest provocation. It doesn’t need fresh injury to breathe. Memory, alone, is enough.
The memories don’t have to be conjured, either. They intrude. They arrive unbidden, without warning, leaving both hope and healing, if not in jeopardy, at least, in doubt.
For quite a long while, I viewed pain as only destruction, a force that shattered and left ruin in its wake. At first, that’s all it seemed to be. But in its persistence, in its refusal to be buried, I began to wonder—what if pain is not just a tormentor, but a teacher? What if every crack it carves into me is making space for something else, something new, someone new.
Healing did not come the way I had hoped it would. There were few “I’m sorrys.” Even fewer overtures made. I offered forgiveness that was not sought.
Regardless, my healing came—not because the wounds were tended, but because they were laid bare. It seems counterintuitive, but the healing I longed for came only from the breaking. From the way pain refused to let me stay unchanged, working sanctification by way of suffering. From the way it forced me to look at what still ached and decide—do I let this wounding define me, or do I let it shape me into who I would not be without it?
I chose the latter.
Not because it was easy, but because I could not stay where pain first left me. I understood, even in the wreckage, that redemption was at work, shaping me in ways I could not yet understand.
God is a master at making use of what we would rather discard. He takes the very things we would never choose—the sorrows, the losses, the wounds too deep for words—and, with hands both gentle and sure, reshapes them, transforming them, and us, in the process.
He sifts the pain, mining it for the treasures found within: redemption in the rubble, beauty in the broken, grace in the grief.
Present sufferings are the foundation for future glory, but what they ultimately become depends upon our response:
Will we surrender? Or will we strive with God? Will we place in His hands what is out of ours? Or will we resist, impervious to His workmanship? What seems only destruction, beloved, can become, in His hands, the raw material for something magnificent, eternal, and of great significance.
May we shift our perspective today. May we see pain as friend, not foe. Pain is a persistent prisoner, yes. But maybe, just maybe, it is also an architect of who we were meant to be all along.
An architect in the hands of the Architect.
“Remember not the former things, neither consider the things of old. Behold, I will do a new thing…”
~ 𝐈𝐬𝐚𝐢𝐚𝐡 𝟒𝟑:𝟏𝟖,𝟏𝟗