Pain. Pain is something we all share. Pain is something we all have experienced—albeit to a lesser or greater degree—and something we will all yet experience again. My first encounter with significant pain was when I was four years old. We were living in an old, Dutch-built mission house in a seaside village called Sakawa in the city of Odawara. I had seen Mamma take a tube of eye ointment off the top of her dresser and apply some to her eyes. I don't know what the medication was for—but wanting to be like Mamma—I climbed up the drawers on my brother's dresser and grabbing a tube of model airplane glue, I squirted it in my right eye. The stinging and burning was profound; so was my scream—because of which Mamma came running. With me screaming uncontrollably, she and my father rushed me to an eye doctor, where he flushed my eye out for about 30 minutes. I came home looking like a miniature pirate with my newly acquired eyepatch. Significant pain became my teacher that day; I have never put model airplane glue in my eye again. I've since surmised that Mamma was likely wondering if this son of hers could be traded in for a smarter model or maybe just returned altogether. Thankfully, I didn't come with a receipt!

My second encounter with significant pain was the introduction to Novocain shots while in the dentist's chair. The dentist thought that by pinching my gum between his thumb and index finger while inserting the yard-long needle into my gum would help alleviate the pain. He was sorely mistaken! Again, there was much screaming which followed. I will not attempt to traumatize further any of you who may have had similar experiences.

My next encounter with significant pain came upon our return to Japan from a year of furlough in the United States. While on the plane, my friend and I had collected souvenirs while in the airplane restroom. We found little tubes of toothpaste, toothbrushes, single-use shavers with double-edged razor blades screwed safely within the shaver's plastic handle and housing. Before beginning my new school at Christian Academy in Japan, we had a week or two to settle into our new home in Maebashi city. I had since removed the double-edged razor blades from their plastic shavers. Now, going out to play, I carefully placed them in my sweatshirt tube pocket, successfully keeping them from the prying eyes of Mamma, who had long since developed a habit of spying on us with a nervous tick. Sometime later in the afternoon, I forgot that the double-edged razor blades were still in my tube pocket. With the air growing chilly in the late afternoon, I jammed both hands into my tube pocket, successfully slicing the palm side of all of my fingers. I came running and screaming into the house, hands held—palms out—in front of me so I would not have to see the blood from the half-dozen or so cuts streaming down my palms and forearms. Mamma retrieved the bottle of Mercurochrome and applied it liberally to my many cuts. She must have done this in partial payback for shortening her life and for turning her hair gray by the age of thirty-three. The stinging pain was profound! More screams followed.

My introduction to life in the boarding school at Christian Academy in Japan led me to an entirely different kind of pain, the pain of missing my parents, having to say goodbye to them each week, coupled with the pain of being bullied by some of the other boys in the dorm. I was the only seven-year-old in the dormitory; the rest of the boys in my dorm were ten years or older. My brother repeatedly told my parents that the boys in my dorm were bullying me, begging them to remove me from the school. To this day, I have no idea why they didn't listen. Maybe it was Mamma's only recourse, torn between my being bullied by the boys at CAJ and my being bullied at the hands of my rageful and abusive father at home. Leaving me in the dorm was her only recourse for keeping me safe from my father. I did tell the dorm mother, but she told me not to tattletale, and so for the next four years, I silently bore through all the bullying, teasing, and mistreatment.

Some pain has a way of leading to other pain. Soon after experiencing the pain of having to say goodbye to my parents each week and the pain of being bullied at school, I began having severe migraines. My parents took me to all kinds of doctor's appointments, even having an EEG done on my brain while failing to recognize the likely and obvious cause. I was introduced experientially to the higher side of the one to ten pain scale, a scale on which severe migraines are given an objective nine on the Richter scale of acute pain.

Along with the severity of the migraines came vomiting. To this day, I am known as the little boy who threw up a lot. My friend Jim—while kindly leading me by hand from the boarding school dining room just after a severe migraine had struck like a lightning bolt over dinner—got to experience it firsthand when I vomited all over his hand. Some pain has a way of leading to other pain. As a final remedy, the doctor prescribed Fiorinal, a powerful pain killer. I would come back to the dorm after class with a searing migraine for which the dorm mother would give me a Fiorinal tablet. Within a half-hour, I'd be sound asleep. When I awoke, I found myself strangely dazed; no one ever told me that I was higher than a kite. I'd go outside and sit on the grass on the edge of the playground and watch through a drugged fog the other children play.

Paul Stookey of Peter, Paul, and Mary once quipped in one of his comedic songs that pain "prepares the child for later traumatic experience." Even with severe migraines, I had never felt pain as the day my sister and I waited together in the car for three hours in the clinic parking lot. When my parents came out of the clinic, we found out that Mamma had been diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer. I never knew that a single phrase, terminal cancer, could bring such pain. So was watching the disease eat away at her body over the next three years, beginning with one mastectomy and then another, followed by a hysterectomy. In the last six months of her life, she contracted a staph infection in her lungs while in the hospital, which resulted in one of her lungs collapsing. To treat both the disease and collapsed lung, the surgeon removed two ribs from her back, inserting two tubes into her lung from which my father would drain liters of fluid each day. Sometimes I would help him. On a beautiful, sunny, Sunday afternoon, after returning to the hospital from having lunch with our extended family at the Boatshed at Point Defiance Park, I stood in defiance of the tsunami of pain I felt on the inside while outwardly looking at her lifeless body. Some pain leaves you profoundly numb.

Hearing the diagnosis that I have metastatic prostate cancer in my right pubic bone has had its own pain, borne on the memories of seeing both of my parents succumb to cancer. I have often recently been asked, "What's your pain—on a scale from one to ten?" How does one quantify the pain of finding out that one's mother has terminal cancer? How does one quantify the shock of finding out that you have cancer? The pictured charts have been beneficial, charts that attempt to make what is so subjective to each of us, objective. For three years leading up to my diagnosis and surgery, I experienced much pain from cancer—while not knowing it was there. Since my recovery from both the surgery and my extra stay in the hospital, I have had very little pain from cancer. However, I also have been diagnosed with degenerative arthritis, which has destroyed my right hip, leaving me with bone on bone. I am awakened most nights from pain from my hip. I treat the pain by again turning on the heating pad, waiting for it to reheat, and then finally able to drift off back to sleep. Because of my former life in addiction, I try to stay away from narcotics. So now, I'm seeking whether to have a hip replacement. I want to live my life, doing the things I love the most, hiking with my family, going on long walks with them, bicycling and even ice and roller skating—and maybe climbing a mountain or two. Right now, I am confined to using a walker or double canes to prevent me from falling lest I break the bone that they've just finished radiating.

One of the things I do to help restore some cadence to my life is to attend Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. Although I have experienced much pain in my life, the stories I have heard at A. A. meetings, stories told with such brutal, raw honesty, have revealed lives of such pain that it beggars my imagination. I suspect that some of you have lived such lives or are now amid chronic and severe pain. One thing I am learning from all this pain: I have had to learn to trust God amid the pain. I've asked Him, "Why is this happening?" I've heard only two responses, His still small voice whispering in my spirit, "I love you, Grant," and, "Just trust Me!" Pain is the school of faith.

Maybe pain also has a way of preparing us for the next life, pain that is so unbearable that death seems a welcome friend—even though death is the last enemy to be destroyed. Pain gives us a longing to be home. Pain gives us a yearning to be safe at last. Pain gives us a longing to run into the comforting embrace yet waiting for us. Pain makes us weary of this life; pain brings us to long for the next.

The Apostle John, likely near the end of his life—a life filled with the pain of seeing Jesus tortured, crucified, dead and buried—penned words of sheer hope borne on the wind of the Holy Spirit,

"And I heard a loud voice from the throne, saying, "Behold, the tabernacle of God is among men, and He will dwell among them, and they shall be His people, and God, Himself will be among them, and He will wipe away every tear from their eyes; and there will no longer be any death; there will no longer be any mourning or crying, or pain; the first things have passed away." Revlation 21:3,4 (NASB)

There will no longer be any pain. I don't know what pains might yet lie ahead. I don't want to know. I don't even want to guess or imagine. However, with each pain comes the grace of Jesus to endure it. I've lived in the power of His grace now for the past thirty-five years. But to think that in the life to come, there will no longer be any pain, I am left with hope, the hope of being pain-free. Hope, the promise of being with Jesus forever. Hope.”