Physical pain can be a voice, for good or for bad, whispering to us in our bumps and bruises, other times shouting: warning us of serious life issues lurking out there on the distant horizon.
Sometimes, when we’re courageous enough to peer into the depths of pain, it reveals something more about life than what we first glimpsed on the surface.
Like the other day.
I winced, grabbing the back of my left leg.
I had added another training cycle to my leg workout. “You dummy,” I heard a voice in my head say. “Don’t you know you can’t work out that hard at your age?”
A few nights before, I had awakened, after having added that weight routine. The pain was whispering something to me. But I didn’t get it.
The next day, before my workout, I decided to give my legs a good stretch.
And that’s when I felt the hamstring of my left leg pop, like a broken guitar string.
That pesky little voice was shouting: “I told you your muscles and tendons are getting more and more brittle, like that old rubber band you found in the kitchen drawer that has lost its elasticity.”
But then, I recalled the last time I felt that pain in my left hamstring. I even remember the place and time: the football practice field at Altus (OK) High School, August 1974.
We were doing wind sprints when I felt that same pop. And the pain dropped me to the ground, where I rolled around on the turf, clutching my left hamstring, writhing in pain.
I never really recovered. The injury plagued me, hampering my senior year in football. I didn’t get to start on the first team until the play-offs, and then, the first time I carried the ball, the opposing team’s defensive nose-guard knocked me out cold, and my football “career” was officially done.
I hadn’t thought about that high school injury until the other day, when I felt that same pain, though not as piercing as it was in 1974.
Looking back from the perspective of 50 years, I see how that high school injury helped me realize the relative importance of sports. Even if I had had a stellar year in football, I would still, at 5’6 “and 150 pounds, not have been on any college coach’s recruiting radar.
The Lord used that disappointing time in my life to draw me closer to Him. I was learning the truth of 1 Timothy 4:8: “Physical training is good, but training for godliness is much better, promising benefits in this life and in the life to come.”
When Lori chided me for working out too intensely, I reminded her of the same injury I had suffered in my youth.
“Who knows,” I teased, “if I hadn’t pulled that hamstring back in ’74, I might have been so full of myself I wouldn’t have taken the time to gaze across the cafeteria line and spy one little Lori Wilburn and asked her to the homecoming dance,” I said, her giggle reminding me of the sophomore she had been when I first dated asked her out.
Throughout life, there would be other voices, people’s pain touching me, with a hurt that can pierce the soul, echoing from their lives to mine as I grieve their absence. Others, I feel, as they walk in the shadow of death this very day.
Now, in this moment, I listen to the angst their suffering has planted in me.
And turning away from myself, listening heavenward, I thank God for His Voice—the eternal words of love and reassurance, comforting words that God works all things together for the good in the lives of his children.
Even if He has to remind me through a pulled hamstring.