Being a Christian is not for the faint at heart.  It requires courage to be able to trust God implicitly with all the ins and outs of your heart, to be able to be completely vulnerable, with no walls and no masks at all.  (It takes courage to be vulnerable.)

It requires the ability to run with unrelenting passion and perseverance the path that God has marked for us.  And that running must include a willingness to run right smack dab into pain.  -- Can I do that?

To embrace pain is to embrace a new way of having fellowship with the Son.  To push it away is to push Him away.  There is always hope when Jesus is standing with us in the pain.

But pain without Jesus – is just pain.  Thinking about someone so close to me needing to face the grief of pain without Jesus terrifies me.   It makes my heart feel like it’s dropping clear down to my feet.  My heart constricts and I can hardly breathe.

But God IS.  And His love is far-reaching.  I don’t understand anything.  But I’m finally beginning to understand how to look at God through the pain.  Not “beyond” the pain or “around” the pain, but through it.  The certainty of Him makes me capable of continuing to step forward in this life.