Letting the Pain Out – Expanded Version

When we’re sad or depressed, we like it when the weather agrees.  Rustic rainy skies assist the spirit within to feel safe and at home.  We let it rain in the depths of our souls and we embrace the therapy of God working into the nodules of our sorrows.

Mary’s husband died in a workplace accident.  But there was no escape into her grief with her young children around.  She’d wait until their eyes flickered and closed; until their hearts gave way to dreams, then slowly she would let the pain out — tears long borne on a weary, torn heart — irreparable by sprinklings of cliché or falsehood.  Some time with God, in some sort of prayer, and some solace at last.  God becomes real in these moments.

Sadness is nothing to feel ashamed about when we know there are others out there, too, beckoning gloomy days.

Tears must come in such sadness; that or anger for being cheated of cherished moments alone with the Spirit of our hearts.

An Important Warning for Denying Our Essential Truth

We’re warned.  Reject the need to spill our sullenness and soon there’s anger — the cheapening of emotion; damage abounding; walls of a dam breached by the tidal overflow of rains too generous.

Such a thing as pain we cannot contain.

We need to let the pain out.

***

Letting the pain out,

We’re assured in this,

Is putting paid to doubt,

That our souls would remain amiss.

Letting the pain out,

How could we otherwise contend?

So let the pain out,

In order for God to mend.

***

Find a safe place and let the pain out.  Trust authenticity.  It’s all we have.  It’s all we need.

Find a safe place and let out the anger, the confusion, the bitterness of betrayal, the sense of denial for a thing too tough to handle just now. Letting out such things is giving way to God; to release what would never be in God’s will for us to retain.

What sense is there in the retention of a thing that continues to torment us?

No, there is a better way.

We take the blissful opportunity to let go, and we allow ourselves the relative privilege of feeling the approval of God.

We may never know God quite so well as in being shackled by our experiences of pain in a darkened room—a dungeon—within our souls.

***

Find a safe place and let the pain out.  Trust authenticity.  It’s all we have.  It’s all we need.

© 2013 S. J. Wickham.