To sum up a theme of the course, if pain is a gift God gives, then it has a purpose that we need to seek if we are to move on with our lives. If we ignore our pain or try to numb it, we are choosing to live out of alignment with God’s purpose. We are on a path to dysfunction. And so I’ve posed the question: What was the purpose for your pain? Have you asked your pain what it was there to teach you? What is God’s big picture perspective on your pain? Was he blind to the trauma you endured? Or did he perhaps just not care? What would it look like to ask God, where...

When we’ve been in pain before and see a similar scenario before us, the next thing we feel is usually fear. God buried that response deep in our brain. It’s what kept our ancestors alive.   Animals can smell fear. Can you smell the fear in our society? A few years ago ISIS was marching through Iraq and inspiring would-be terrorists elsewhere. And we were afraid.   Today we are reeling from another massacre and we’re asking ourselves, “Where is there a safe haven?” Not in Sutherland Springs, TX. Not in Las Vegas. Not in NYC. Not in our schools....

https://www.ted.com/talks/brene_brown_listening_to_shame?language=en     Today we’re going to try something a little different. You’ve probably heard of Brene Brown. Her work on shame is so good, I’ve posted it above for us to listen to. Let me recommend that you set aside 20 minutes to do so and then comment on what she shares about shame below.   Shame is usually a secondary hurt, not a primary one. Something terrible happens that hurts us deeply. And then, compounding the hurt, we feel shame.   We can get guilt and shame confused. Guilt is feeling...

Your freedom from pain is often hard-earned. Going through pain (as we’ve done in the last seven weeks) is hard work. And if the enemy of our souls is whispering in our ear, it can seem like an impossible task.    The Bible tells us he hunts us like a lion hunts game. He attacks us when we are most vulnerable. He wants to keep us in that place of pain. He especially wants us to hang onto bitterness and a victim mindset. Or maybe we feel insecure and unloved and he piles on with thoughts of rejection. Or we may live in fear of being discovered for the fraud that we...

A foundational truth that we’ve emphasized so far is that God wants to take our pain and redeem it.  Unfortunately, evil wants to do the opposite. It wants to use the pain in your life and use it to separate you from all that is good. Evil is real and has targeted you for even greater pain. Evil wants to take all that you own, including those who are precious to you and even your own life. It wants to chip away at you until you are cynical, neurotic and depressed. It will target you and fill your mind with negative thoughts that you in turn slime others with Pain that festers...

You’ve lost so much in life. And when we lose things that have touched our hearts, we feel pain. We can’t help it, God set it up that way. The problem is that often we just can’t handle the pain at the time.  There’s too much pain already. Our hearts were bruised and never healed. We began to feel it would be better to just lock the pain away and not acknowledge it. Survival was at stake, and the pain was inconvenient, illegitimate even. So here’s what we humans do – we take that part of our heart that was wounded and we shut it down in some...