Coming out of the voting booth you do not anticipate another person telling you very personal insights from their life just outside the building. But there we were and they were telling me of the many things that had happened over the last eight years. The loss of a child, challenges in business, the economy, holding a family together. I have left out a lot of the details, but, it was as though they were screaming for some relief from the pain of it all.
Oddly, earlier in the morning when I was taking our sixteen year old, Suzanne to school, we stopped by the local Kroger to get some Advil, a pain reliever. As I opened the bottle she said, “Do you know how pain relievers work? We learned about it in Health and Human Growth Development class.”
I did not know how they worked at all, just that they did.
She continued, “They have a chemical that intercepts the pain and then tells the brain the pain is gone.”
This peaked my interest so I Googled it later in the day. Here is what I found on Yahoo Answers.
“How opioids/opiates (pain medication) works. Before the signal reaches the pain-monitoring section of your brain, though, it goes through a receptor first. The receptor is like a radio relay station – it helps push the pain message to its final destination. Opioids attach themselves to special opioid receptors in the brain, the spinal cord, and the gastrointestinal tract. Once the opioids latch on, you’re still in pain, but you no longer feel the pain, because these pain signals have been blocked from going any farther.”
Interesting…never in a thousand years would I have guessed that.
I found the phrase that said very telling, “You are still in pain, but you no longer feel the pain.”
That is what my fellow voter needed. Even though he was still in pain he needed something to intercept the pain so that he would no longer feel it.
We all carry around some type of pain. Whether it is physical, emotional, psychological, spiritual, etc., we each are carrying around some pain.
Maybe it is self inflicted, or inflicted by another person.
Or…or…could it be so?
Maybe it is inflicted by God.
From the book of Job come these two verses.
“Behold, how happy is the man whom God reproves; so do not despise the discipline of the Almighty.
For He inflicts pain, and gives relief; He wounds, and His hands also heal.”
job 5:17-18
Be comforted by this thought. That even though you may have pain in your life it is God who brings the eventual relief and it is His hands who heal.
I bet my voter friend could trust in those verses. I know he could.
I think I will send it to him.
JHH
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