Pain doing its work

I came home a week ago Sat. from rehab after knee replacement. It hasn't been easy--physical therapy exercises, pain, little sleep, pain, reading, pain, praying, pain...you get the idea. What sleep I have been getting has been interrupted with pain.

Henri Nouwen in The Inner Voice of Love, wrote:

There is a deep hole in your being, like an abyss. You will never succeed in filling that hole, because your needs are inexhaustible. You have to work around it so that gradually the abyss closes...

There are two extremes to avoid: being completely absorbed in your pain and being distracted by so many things that you stay far away from the wound you want to heal.1.

Pain can be all consuming, whereas it is God that should be all consuming.

Yet again, I am confronted with that which I am unable to do in my own strength, reminded of who I need to look to. Our faith walk is not always easy, but in the tough times we learn upon whom we can and must lean. That's the lesson for me, what about you?

Photo from Flickr.
1. Henrie J. M. Nouwen, The Inner Voice of Love (New York: Doubleday, 1996), 3.