Don’t Waste Your Pain!

Don’t waste your life. Or better yet: don’t waste your pain. One of the great mistakes we make is to waste the pain that God let’s come our way. Instead of letting our pain open doors of opportunities for our light to shine to others, we complain and grumble at and about God and we miss the God given opportunities of pain. We all have plenty of experiences in this life. We have family experiences, work, and professional experiences, we have educational experiences, fun experiences, winning experiences, and painful experiences. And we can influence others most powerfully through our painful, hurting experiences. Listen to what the apostle Paul says in 2 Cor. 1:3-4, “All praise to God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. God is our merciful Father and the source of all comfort. He comforts us in all our troubles so that we can comfort others. When they are troubled, we will be able to give them the same comfort God has given us.” Did you see the reason for our hurts and pains? So that we can comfort others that are going through the same experiences that we have been through. And I guarantee you this: someone close to you right now is facing a painful situation that you have gone through in your life. And God is wanting to use you to bring to them comfort. Paul himself wasn’t immune to problems that almost took him down. Just a few verses after these verses Paul writes in vs. 8-11, “We don’t want you in the dark, friends about how hard it was when all this came down on us in Asia province. It was so bad we didn’t think we were going to make it. We felt like we’d been sent to death row, that it was all over for us. As it turned out, it was the best think that could have happened. Instead of trusting in our own strength or wits to get out of it, we were forced to trust God totally—not a bad idea since he’s the God who raises the dead! And he did it, rescued us from certain doom. And he’ll do it again, rescuing us as many times as we need rescuing.” MSG Wow! What a testimony and what a hope for us. Right now, God is wanting us to let him use our pain so that someone else can see that we too are weak and feeble, but with God as our strength, we can make it. You have a purpose today: take your pain and use it to shine the light of Jesus to those hurting around you.