Last night my adult small group had Thanksgiving in March. It was amazing. Turkey with all the trimmings. Matt, our leader and chef, always does such an amazing dinner for us, but this week he went to the extreme; and so did I.
During the dinner I began to have what’s a more frequent episode. My esophagus doesn’t always work like it should. The corresponding pain in my chest is both scary and excruciating. This time it caused me to go to the ER.
I was only in the ER for about an hour. The pain subsided on its own after I coughed up a couple rounds of turkey. Afterward they gave me some paperwork and told me to schedule some tests in a couple of days.
As I reflect on this experience, there are a couple of parallels I can make to the sin cannundrum. I will for sure work this in as illustrations when I teach. After all, I’m sure the bill for last night’s ER visit will be quite high. Might as well get my money’s worth from the experience, right?
1. Pain can be life saving, even though we do anything to avoid or ignore it. The sharpest pain I felt last night was when my body was creating the fluids around the turkey. This fluid was necessary for it to propel the turkey back up my esophagus and out of my mouth. Each time this happened, I had an amazing peace and comfort afterward.
When we go through pain caused by sin in our lives, God will do what it takes to surround that sin with discomfort so we will get it out of our lives. Some cope with it by going through denial or soothing the pain with other means. However, we only block the path toward health God is trying to lay out for us.
2. Both times I’ve had this esophagus issue in the past couple of months, I’ve been eating turkey. Guess wht I’m pulling out of my diet. Even if turkey isn’t the cause (nobody knows the cause of esophagus spasms), I’m going to take an educated guess and “expel the immoral brother”. Between removing a food I love from my diet and repeating last night’s pain, I’ll choose not eating turkey again… Unless we find another trigger causing this.
The nature of addictions is to endure the pain and damage it causes to us physically and relationally. Instead of coping with issues by masking them, we need to turn away (repent) from those things that destroy us. Only when we do this will we finally have the peace and rest I cherished last night in the ER each time my body rejected the foreign objects that were killing me.
3. Get this at any cost. When I was experiencing enough pain, I went looking for an open urgent care, but eventually went to the ER. I didn’t care what the visit would cost, I just wanted help.
As they say in recovery, your only as sick as your secrets. When the pain of your secrets outweighs the fear of being found out, a person will get help. My first response was not to seek help last night. I originally went home hoping the pain would pass on its own like it has in the past. As I sat in my recliner ignoring the pain, it began to intensify and I began to search for solutions.
When I got to the ER and told them I had severe chest pains, nobody judged me for having them, they just admitted me as quickly as possible and helped me work through the pain. I realize each pin requires a different response. In this case, they didn’t ave to fix me. They just had to help me understand the pain and low me a place to let it pass. They Los talked to me about doing further tests.
The bottom line to this third learning is when I hurt bad enough I got help without fear of the steps needed to take to get healthy. I knew where I needed to go and that it might have a high personal cost. I was willing to accept both realities and got the help I need. Now I’m on a new path and committed to removing the source of pain from my life.
If I went out or a turkey sandwich knowing what I know now, that would be insane. I know that will lead to amazing pain. Yet, many people are eating turkey sandwiches every day (whatever that represents in their lives). They might know the truth, but it hasn’t set them free. I’m choosing to be set free from the truth that doing something foreign to God’s design will cause pain so that I’ll fall back in line with his design for life.
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This week I asked my Bible study students what advice they would give to a new Christian. Here’s the list they came up with:
