Pain

"Sometimes what seems like surrender isn't surrender at all.  It's about what's going on in our hearts.  About seeing clearly the way life is and accepting it and being true to it, whatever the pain, because the pain of not being true to it is far, far greater."
-- Nicolas Evan, the Horse Whisperer

The past few months have been filled with a lot of pain. A lot of being honest with myself and with what is really going on in my life and my interactions with people around me. I don't like feeling hurt. I don't like feeling things that cause discomfort. For physical pain, there is a pill you can take that makes it all go away....but for the pain that resides in your heart, the only way to heal yourself from that pain is to let yourself feel it and be honest about it.

For so long, I chose not to see what was actually happening in my life.  Choosing not to see that someone chooses someone else.  Choosing not to see that life changes, people move on and we all grow and change.  It was easier to hold so tightly to the world that I created and not see the world that I actually live in.

Often it's easy to pretend that our friendships are what we want them to be, when in fact they are falling apart.  It is easy to pretend that we have the relationships we want, when in fact we don't.  It's easy to believe we make the decisions that will make us ultimately happy, even if they inflict pain now, when in fact we don't.

Denial is not a river in Egypt.

Pain is how we grow. Pain is how our body heals. It's not always fun. When I look back at all of my surgeries, there was a lot of pain involved in each one. The pain of surgery is far greater (at least in my case) than the pain of living with whatever is "wrong" in your body. But part of our being created in the likeness of the Lord is that humans are able to see ahead, endure something that is more painful now for the benefit of feeling less pain in the future. To endure pain, sometimes, is necessary. And as you grow, the pain lessens and hopefully in the long run you will be be "better" and experience less pain.

Cohelo wrote in "The Alchemist:"

"Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams, because every second of the search is a second's encounter with God and with eternity."