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Over the past 4 years, I think it’s safe to say I’ve become acquainted with pain. On the popular 0-10 Pain Scale used in the medical field, I spend the majority of my days at a 5. In the first moments of waking up after another sleep-starved night, my aching bones and screaming muscles try to convince me I was recently in a car accident. As the day progresses I drag about with an unpredictable amount of energy (or lack thereof), wondering if my body is really just a giant bruise covering bones made of broken glass. How would you pray for someone like that?
Not the way you’d expect
A wonderful part of Christian community is that we’re a family. When we find out someone is suffering, we feel deep concern and a desire to help where we can. As more people have gotten to know me, I’ve seen this more and more as people try to sympathize with someone suffering in such a weird and constant way. And of course, many pray in faith for God to heal my body.
Over the years, I’ve enjoyed the raised eyebrows I get when I respond to someone’s offer to pray for my healing. While I certainly want to be healed, as does anyone in physical pain, I’ve learned that physical comfort isn’t a requirement in living a life of holiness. It would be convenient, and certainly my preferred way to go about it, but physical suffering isn’t some sign of sin or a lack of God’s favor. Indeed, many Christians find their greatest passion for God in the midst of suffering.
In addition to praying for physical healing, here are 3 important ways to pray for someone in pain.
#1 – Pray for their family
When someone goes through a life-altering experience, it’s easy to see how much it affects that person. Their entire lives may change, if only temporarily, as they are forced to adjust to a life of pain or impairment. It’s so easy to forget that in the midst of their pain, others are suffering as well.
When someone is afflicted, those close to them have their lives changed as well. A spouse may lose an amount of physical or emotional intimacy. Kids may lose their human jungle-gym. Schedules get messed up, the house starts falling part, and an entire family’s dynamic may shift dramatically in a short amount of time.
During all of that, it’s easy for resentment and anger to set in. This is easily true of the person suffering, but their family is just as easily affected. Hopes for the future, whether it’s buying a home or taking a vacation, may be thrown out. Certain childhood rites-of-passage, like learning to play sports, may not live up to our ideals. In a way, physical pain can make a family experience a sense of loss as they find a way to adjust to their changed lives.
As we pray for those in physical pain, it’s important to pray for their family as well. They may find themselves questioning God. They may struggle to respect or accept the new limitations on their spouse or parent. In those moments, God’s comfort and wisdom is needed by an entire home, not just a single person.
#2 – Pray for their spiritual health
Our physical health is a gift from God. It’s not something we need, nor is it something we deserve. Yet as people who are redeemed by the blood of Christ and filled with the Holy Spirit, the same isn’t true of our spiritual health.
Physical pain is vicious and isolating. It makes us experience the world in a way that others simply aren’t. A person feels very alone as others easily go about their lives without any thought given to how much pain they’ll be in later. Detachment, jealousy, frustration, and even abandonment are easily felt as a person suffers silently.
Over time, those feelings start to fester. We may feel like people are treating us poorly, rarely checking in on us or offering to help. We may withdraw from others, finding the physical and emotional effort too taxing. We focus more and more on how our pain affects us, breeding a constant state of bitterness and, if we’re honest, a bit of entitlement as we think we deserve better.
As though that weren’t bad enough, we will eventually turn that on God. We ask what we did to deserve this. Doesn’t He want us to serve Him? Does He realize how much pain we’re in? Does He even care?
God doesn’t call us to a life of feeling good and being happy. He calls us to a life of love and service to Him. Yet when we suffer, it’s so easy to forget that call. It’s easy to fall into the trap of “sunny day Christianity,” being excited to serve God when things are going our way and life is good, even by the world’s standards.
Pray for the spiritual health of those who suffer. Pray that they don’t let bitterness take root in their hearts. Pray that they will still seek time with God, pursue holiness, and love their God with all their heart and mind, no matter what state their body is in.
#3 – Pray that God’s glory is displayed
If Christian books and movies teach us anything, it’s that we love giving God glory by seeing miracles. We look forward to seeing God doing the impossible, whether it’s helping an underdog, seeing a dying person healed, or completely changing someone’s life. These things make us feel so passionate for God because He so clearly displays Himself.
However, the world is filled with many more stories where a person gets sick, stays sick, and dies. There’s no great sign from Heaven, no one’s life seems to be turned around, and the world around us continues as if nothing had happened. In those times, we are confronted with two possibilities: either God failed, or God deserves just as much glory as if the person were healed.
This is the incredible truth of our suffering. We so often want it to mean something. We want to post on social media and prove to people that God is real and active because of how He’s blessed us. Yet God does receive glory, though often not how we’d imagine.
God is very clear that He’s not just an elevated version of a human being. He’s not just a really smart, really powerful version of us. He is God. He is the ultimate, with goals and purposes that far exceed anything we could imagine. Likewise, His ways of accomplishing those things are often beyond our comprehension that we are often foolish enough to question why He does something.
Why do the righteous suffer while the wicked prosper? Why doesn’t God heal us so people can know He’s real? Why does He leave us in our suffering, appearing silent as we cry out to Him for faith and relief?
For His glory. We don’t understand how, and we don’t understand why, but God allows these things because, in the end, it’s for the best. Perhaps He does it for the person suffering. Perhaps it somehow blesses those around that person. Perhaps it will have a payoff we’ll never even imagine.
The difficult truth is that we don’t know why God allows most things to happen. He doesn’t have to run things by us, nor are His actions up to us to define as right or wrong. He is God. His glory is the ultimate goal of everything, even if that glory is gained through us enduring pain and suffering during this tiny blip of time on the timeline of eternity.
As someone is suffering, the greatest thing we can pray is that God will be glorified through it. Whether it’s through that person’s miraculous healing, or just through their continued pursuit of holiness despite the physical limitations placed on them, we want God’s majesty to shine through every situation.
Pray, pray, pray
A person, and their family, can endure anything by the grace and mercy of God. They can meet that suffering with sorrow and still praise God, or they may finally see it as the greatest thing God could have done because of how much He showed Himself. A Christian can suffer in a way no one else can, because Christ allows them to fade to the back as God’s greatness take center stage.
As we consider those who are suffering, let us certainly pray for their physical healing. However, comfort must always be secondary to necessity. Families need to focus on God as they lose a part of their spouse or parent. Those who are suffering must still pursue God, using their pain as a new way to understand and glorify Him. And in the end, our goal will always be to see God’s glory displayed through every aspect of our life.
Sometimes through good things, but most often through the bad, God shows who He is through His children. Through Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit, we can magnify God’s name and find comfort in knowing that He is working through everything, including our pain.
Not that I speak from want, for I have learned to be content in whatever circumstances I am. I know how to get along with humble means, and I also know how to live in prosperity; in any and every circumstance I have learned the secret of being filled and going hungry, both of having abundance and suffering need. I CAN DO ALL THINGS THROUGH HIM WHO STRENGTHENS ME. (Phillippians 4:11-13)
