Lent / Pain

by Josh VonGunten

In late August, 2020, something really painful happened to me. While playing in a soccer game, I suffered a bad knee injury. The moment it happened remains remarkably ingrained in me. Somehow I can still feel and hear the moment of the pop. I can still see the greenish-yellow, worn-out late summer grass coming closer and closer as I fell to the ground. I screamed. I cussed. The pain was instantly overwhelming. After some friends helped me off the field, I pressed hard for a few minutes into a state of delusional optimism. I told myself it was just a bad fall. I tried to walk it off hoping to get back in the game. After taking a few awkward and painful steps on my own, my denial vanished. My knee was beginning to swell and I had very little stability. It was time to go home.

Two long weeks later I would finally get in for an MRI and subsequently learn over the phone that I had torn my ACL and Meniscus. The ACL part was everything I was hoping to avoid. I questioned the nurse who called to inform me. I tried one last move of delusional optimism by suggesting maybe the image of my knee wasn’t clear enough. Maybe the scan was inconclusive? I mean, that happens sometimes, right? While being humored and kindly brought back to reality I winced in pain as I bent and examined my swollen knee in hope of producing a different diagnosis for myself. I put a little weight on it searching for some new reason to question what I was hearing. No luck, just reality. After hanging up the phone I was slightly relieved to have a diagnosis but supremely disappointed in the facts of the matter, specifically, knee surgery followed by two weeks of downtime, four weeks on crutches, and two months of bi-weekly physical therapy.

Of course there’s never a good time for knee surgery but while this was happening we were in the middle of a major home renovation project, we were training a puppy, and it was early fall, a time when our kids were playing sports, going hard, and living large. I felt sad to sit out of activities with our kids. My time on the couch seemed to pass very slowly. I was enveloped by FOMO as a group of friends went on a hiking trip. My recovery did not advance particularly fast or seem to go anything like what I saw from social media posts of famous athletes I followed. Healing was slow, very slow, and pain lingered. My injured leg lost a lot of muscle and shrank. I walked with the trace of a limp. There were needlessly dark and melodramatic moments when I wasn’t sure if I would ever run again. It was a difficult, sad, weird, and highly emotional time.

And it was an incredibly formative time.

Upon honest review, my knee injury is easily one of the most important and valuable things that happened to me over the last several years.

The process slowed me down and wooed me into a state of deep listening, prayer, and reflection. A number of complex circumstances serendipitously conspired to create something like a sweet spot for contemplation. Real or imagined, I can’t explain it, but I felt in moments, particularly at night, that I was being completely stripped of everything that brought me a sense of security. This gave way to a profoundly spiritual experience, one that I’m still reckoning with. I began to see with a painful and liberating clarity specific ways I had been holding back, playing it safe, stopping short of loving others with a fierce and reckless fullness. I began to see how I had failed to see and identify with people in pain or those who felt left out. I began to wrestle with an early 40’s awareness that my body, while healing slowly, was entirely capable of breaking down. In these ways, and more, I was undeservedly saturated with gifts of vision that only come by contemplating the experience of suffering and loss. So, I took notes.

After a quick scan of the headlines, it’s easy to see that a knee surgery is not all that difficult of an experience. After all, I was injured while playing a game and received incredible medical treatment. There’s not much to gain in comparing or ranking pain but it’s worth noting that what I went through was relatively easy compared to losing a loved one or battling a life-threatening disease. Yet, this painful experience did contain a surprising abundance of needed wisdom.

2 Corinthians 4:7-18 bears witness to the enigmatic relationship between suffering and new life. Somehow, when we face and embrace suffering, the Spirit of God is uniquely at work within that encounter to bring about new vision, life, and wisdom. There’s an astonishing correlation made between the value of every day, momentary suffering, and a coming “eternal weight of glory.” I wonder if part of what God is up to in creatively redeeming suffering is to create countless invitations for us to slow down, listen, learn, and gather wisdom?

Suffering contains incredible power to spark change, growth, and new perspective…if it is embraced and honored. Without naming, processing, and reflecting upon what has happened, at best, the potential for growth lies dormant, waiting to be explored, at worst, it makes us guarded and bitter. The attention we give (or do not give) to processing our pain, adversity, and loss will have a direct influence (for good or bad) upon our family, friends, and future. Richard Rohr says it this way, “If we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it.” The practice of articulating our loses and naming how we’ve been shaped is what allows for the greatest potential to realize wisdom. It is in the ongoing struggle to describe and make sense of what has happened to us that we slowly gain the clarity needed to see how pain contains surprising gifts and new futures. This process takes courage, time, stillness, and repetition but it will lead us somewhere very good, somewhere previously unknowable. By slowly articulating our suffering into something intelligible and tangible, by naming and writing words specific to our experience, we create the possibility of a different future.

Poem

The Well of Grief by David Whyte

 
Those who will not slip beneath
the still surface on the well of grief,

turning down through its black water
to the place we cannot breathe,

will never know the source from which we drink,
the secret water, cold and clear,

nor find in the darkness glimmering,
the small round coins,
thrown by those who wished for something else.

Practice

When it comes to doing the important work of embracing and considering our suffering, did you know that writing, using your hand, has the ability to draw from and integrate your heart, mind, and soul in ways different from speech or typing? There’s something about working with our memories and writing with our hands that researchers are finding helpful in therapeutic treatment. By writing out our thoughts, feelings, and observations, we seem to be able to seize and galvanize gifts that might otherwise remain unrealized.  

Below is sheet for use in embracing and transforming suffering. This sheet contains simple journal prompts designed to help you work your memories and write your thoughts. Give yourself some time to reflect upon a certain loss or season of pain and begin naming what was lost and what has been found.

Click here for journaling sheet.