School, Wine, and Embracing Pain

Well, we’re a week into the school year, I’m a second week into my dry September, and we survived! And if I’m being honest, maybe we did more than survive. We might even have thrived this week.

The kids recognized some kids they met on the lake over the summer, which softened the intensity of the first few days, they figured out how to change classes every forty-five minutes, and they discovered their new favorite teachers. Emma has a PE teacher who is 7 ft. tall! He’s the talk of the school. There were, of course, a few anxious moments, but everything went way better than I could have ever imagined.

On my part, I am slowly settling into my wine-free evenings. I’m figuring out how to drink warm tea again, and learning to choose presence over numbness, prayer over stupor. That’s saying it more extreme than I should, but there have certainly been moments over the last two weeks when the only thing I wanted was a glass of wine, mainly to tame the emotions and stem the tide of anxiety, of the vulnerability of being a human being. Instead, I am trying to choose to lean in the fears and the regrets, the sorrows and the joy and talk to God about them. (This isn’t new… but I’m trying to deepen this practice.)

What I’m realizing is how easy it is to avoid pain, to do whatever I can not to feel the terrifying feelings of living in a pain-filled world.

A few years ago, I broke two bones on my left hand ring finger. A beam rolled on top of it when I was working on my house project. When it happened, I knew something was wrong. For a brief moment I wondered if I had lost the tip of it. I brought my right hand around my fingers and took a deep breath, knowing I had to face whatever it was that had just happened. I looked down and blood was pooling in my palm and dripping down my arm. The finger looked bludgeoned. My dad, who was visiting me in Chile, rushed me into in the car and we drove to the hospital.

Double exposed fracture, weeks of antibiotics, and lots of pain killers. Interestingly, my doctor was reluctant to give them to me. I insisted on something to help me sleep because I knew the pain would overwhelm me when I closed my eyes. I was right. When nighttime came, the only thing I saw was that big beam smashing my finger.

The first time I went to have the wrap taken off, for the doctor to look at the wound was excruciating. Mainly because I was so afraid to see it. I didn’t want to know the truth. I wanted to keep that little white wrap on my hand and ignore it. Except, I couldn’t. I had to face the fracture if I wanted it to get better…

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I mentioned a couple weeks ago that I want to take a closer look at what it really means to heal. What is healing? How do we recognize when a healing is happening? Does healing mean that everything is my life is perfect, exactly how I want it? Does it mean that I am never sad? That it’s all happy happy, good good?

No. Not at all.

I’m coming to realize is that when we choose to stop numbing our pain, and feel it instead … this becomes one of the first steps on the healing journey. When we choose to feel, to be present, and aware of ourselves and others, we are making the beginning moves toward a wholehearted life.  

When we stuff our pain down, or pretend it’s fine, when we choose busy over intentional, activity over quiet, and turn away from naming the real truths in our lives, the honest to God areas that give us heartache, or real fear, or the areas where we have anxiety, we rob ourselves of the wholeness of life that could be ours. 

I think healing, becoming a whole, integrated person means that I’m free to live my life with my entire heart right in the middle of all the valleys and shadows, in the regrets and the joy, in the pride and the risks. It’s having the capacity and the confidence to enter my own life, to be present in it, and make life-giving choices for me and the people under my care. 

My finger eventually healed. I have free range and I can use it. It doesn’t bend as well as the other fingers and there is some lasting damage, but I can write and work. I can paint my nails, and use my entire hand without favoring my finger. It took months to heal. 

The healing sped up when I finally unwrapped my finger and let the wound be exposed to the light and air, when I stopped being afraid to look at it and let it just be really ugly for a while. And it was ugly. But over time, my nail grew back, the wound closed and my range of motion improved.

May it be like this with us. All of us have areas in our hearts and lives, in our spirits where we feel bludgeoned and overwhelmed — where we don’t have the range of motion we’d like to have.

Don’t be afraid of your pain. Let your wounds out into the air. The sunlight of friends and family and loved ones, the fresh air of exposure will give you the renewed strength to own your pain and step toward honest and wholehearted healing.