Pain Heals Pain

Physical Therapy sounds so drole doesn’t it? Even borderline nice. Of course anyone who has ever undergone physical therapy knows that that is merely a sham. Physical therapy is always a painful experience that we wish we could bypass.
Several years ago I under went some pretty extensive surgeries due to an accident. After all said and done I was condemned to two months of physical therapy. At first I thought that it would be easy, a cakewalk even. I mean how can any place with hot tubs and “massage Therapists” be bad? This would be awesome! And to think insurance would pay for it. I could not have been more wrong. Never in my entire life had I experienced such excruciating pain. To top it off it was so called medical experts that order this barrage of torture! Thankfully within two months I was healthy again.
Over the past 18 years of ministry I have seen people come into the church, beat up, hurt, and wounded. They don’t really want to serve, well actually they don’t feel that it’s healthy for them to serve right now, because they need a time of ‘healing’. They need to just be ‘fed’ for a while. Then they sit, and sit, and sit. And wait, and wait, and wait. What are they waiting for, you ask. I guess they are just waiting to die.
Church and the Kingdom of God have never been set up as a hospice, yet that is what it has seemingly become. We enter the walls of a church when we are hurt, beaten, and bruised, and that is incredible because God cares for the hurting and battered, but he doesn’t re-establish our lives to merely see us sit and die. Nor does he want us to sit and wait on healing so we can then accomplish something. Church is much closer to physical therapy than a hospice.
P.T. is where the hurt, broken, and bruised are exercised, and pushed to their limits in order to rebuild broken and torn members of their body. To be honest with you, the times ive seen people heal the best is not when they are sitting in a pew, but when they choose to channel their hurt and pain towards helping others. More times than not, we find our own personal healing, not as a miraculous moment in time, but rather as a series of propping up other wounded individuals with the very crutches that we have been standing on. Somehow, in God’s miraculous way, He uses our pain and injury to heal others, and then in the process we find ourselves restored.
Think back through your past. How many times have you been helped or urged on by someone in the same situation as you? Someone who may still be in dire straights, or has just stepped out of their own personal hell to help you?
Just imagine what life would be like if we viewed the church as a P.T. office instead of a hospice. Imagine what it would be like if every Sunday we gathered together not to merely survive, but stretch. To be invigorated by our own troubles to go and help someone else who is hurting, bruised or broken. I believe that was the idea when Jesus told us to go out and bring them in. I think that was the reason he told everyone to go into all the world. Not when they were healed and healthy, but just go. Too many times we wait patiently in our stiff upright pews for our emotional and spiritual healing, when in all actuality our the mending of our hearts and spirits is waiting on us to move.
So how about today we all find somebody who could use a little love. Find a neighbor who could use a helping hand. Find your favorite enemy and encourage them. Who ever or whatever crosses your path, take a chance, bless them, and together we can see the kingdom of God take a step forward.