No pain, no gain! What brilliance! Who came up with that? How many times is that repeated daily in our country? I'm not sure it's universal. In Spanish I think it would be No dolor, no beneficio! Not quite the same ring to it.
But I have friends that wake up to this motto every day. Of course
they are runners (you know who you are). I haven't met an accountant yet that has the No Pain, No Gain! motivational poster on his office wall.
My motto is, "No Pain, No Pain!" "Push through the pain" does not compute. Don't you know that when your body is screaming at you with that burning sensation that it's telling you, "This is your last chance, if
you stop now, you might be able to save yourself!"
Self-preservation is my focus.
More accurately I should say comfort is my priority in life. I don't like pain. I guess I'm a pretty good product of U.S. propaganda over the last 50 years.
My lifetime has been characterized by a lack of suffering. The hardest times of my life were the 20% interest rates in the 70s, before I even knew what an interest rate was. From my college years on, our culture has been known for prosperity, success, opportunity, individual comfort, entertainment, entitlement, laziness; as opposed to sacrifice and hard work from the generations that have made our nation great.
Paul talks about comfort too. The only problem is that his take on comfort isn't the Princess Setting on my Select Comfort Bed.
In 2 Corinthians 1, Paul refers to the ”God of all comfort.” In verse 4, he describes this comfort, "Who comforts us in all our affliction so that we will be able to comfort those who are
in any affliction with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God."
I always joke that Paul took up a challenge to see how many times he could get comfort into one sentence, but to be honest, that's probably to cover the fact that he also talks about affliction as though it is a normal part of life.
I don't want to be comforted in affliction; I want to be comforted by being taken out of affliction. Affliction is bad. Does it get worse than that?
Well, we might as well read the next verse, "For just as the sufferings of Christ are ours in
abundance, so also our comfort is abundant through Christ." No, no, no! That doesn't fit the life that I've grown up in! How can an abundance of suffering and an abundance of comfort happen at the same time?
Here's the bottom line that Jesus keeps bringing us back to:
Jesus is our comfort, not our circumstances.
It's not physical blessing that we need, it's Jesus.
His love, His acceptance, His presence, His righteousness, His comfort
yield a life that cannot be marred by the sufferings of this temporal world.
We will have suffering; that's inevitable.
The real question is:
Will you walk it alone,
or will you take His hand and find comfort as you fix your eyes on Him --
our Comfort?
No pain, no gain.
We can keep arguing over that (even though I'm right), but one thing is sure:
No Jesus, no comfort.
Give me comfort, Jesus. I can't make it through this without You.
