Last night I played my electric Guitar for over an hour.  I am not a pick user, so my fingers do all the work.  Usually I have my finger nails long enough on the picking end of things to take a lot of the abuse of hitting the strings a lot.  Last night I started without that advantage and before the time was over, my finger was really hurting.   But I kept on playing, enduring the pain for the sake of the gain of what was happening.  My eyes are shut most of the time in this activity as I concentrate on the Lord.   So I was unaware of the fact that more than pain was happening.        In fact, when I finally stopped, I open my eyes to find that my very sore finger was actually torn open and bleeding.  Not much, but not good.  Then I looked at my guitar and there was blood splattered under the strings from my finger.  This has never happened before, so I was surprised and amazed.  I thought about posting the picture of the bloodied guitar, but it is gross, so I won't. 

My finger is still sore this morning, even as I type.  So I am thinking about the place of pain in our lives.  God has allowed us to feel pain for a purpose.   Whether it is physical, emotional or spiritual, there is a purpose to it.  First of all it catches our attention (or at least it should) and we have to do something about it (or at least we should). It is an indicator that something has happened that is hurting us.  There are all kinds of things that can do this to us, but my meditation is going down the lines of when we do something ourselves that causes pain in our own lives.  Here are some brief observations I have had through my own pain experience.

• Pain is a wake up call to deal with something that we have not paid attention to
• Pain is an interruption of life as usual so we can learn to do things differently
• Pain is an instructor for helping us change our behavior and habits
• Pain can be masked by pain relievers, but that doesn't fix the problem
• Pain should cause us to spend more time with the Lord for His healing solutions
• Pain should not be ignored, lest something worse happens
• Pain is necessary for helping us overcome the reason why it hurts
• Blaming circumstances or others for our pain is not a solution or a way to be healed
• and finally,  pain is only gain if we learn something from it when it happens

May the Lord help us to know how to relate to pain so that we can become healthy and learn to do things that don't generate the pain in the first place. Next time I hope to do things differently when my finger starts hurting when I am playing my guitar.   And now I need to go and clean off the blood that is splattered on it.