pain – Jerry Lout ⚬ Writer ⚬ Speaker ⚬ Mobilizer

June 8, 2023June 9, 2023

In Process

Taking as Jesus did, this sinful world as it is, not as I would have it.

Wait a minute. . . he did that? I am to do that?

That Serenity Prayer line will rattle a person’s status quo underpinnings.

To take on life as it really is we must deal with resistance toward and engagement with the stink of the journey.

In what universe do you find a lame man with a limp openly bearing witness to his “beautiful feet on the mountains bearing good news”*? Can beauty flower and flourish in the middle of contrary forms? Are not all bad things. . . well. . . bad?

The religious tradition I was fostered in generally prescribed an unwritten list of responses to adversity whenever it came calling. Resist – Rebuke – Refuse.

Pain does not bring good to a person’s life. Resist it.

Adversity is not a pathway to human betterment. Rebuke it.

God is not one to bring his children into places of suffering. Refuse it.

In some communities, too, a notion prevails that anything of a non-religious nature is to be avoided – certainly not enjoyed. In my old age I’m drawn to jazz music, gentle instrumentals. Taking in cool smooth blends of light piano, an old upright bass and soft guitar or sax brings a kind of therapeutic effect. I digress.

Jesus took the world as he found it. He resisted straightening out all the bad stuff during his years walking the earth. He did not tackle in a quick moment all the long string of horrors, did not rid the world of them. Not then and not now. The unspeakable pain brought on from evil did not cease upon his entry to the world. He came to the world as it was and lived in it, even ministered in it – where it was, the way he found it – not the way he would have wished it to be.

It seems that God (being all-knowing and wise) opts to allow many of man’s choices – destructive as they often are – to play out unblocked on history’s stage. For now, anyway. If righteous Jesus can exercise self-control enough to hold off righting the world’s wrongs by a sweep of his hand, is he not able to supply his disciples grace and patience to live and serve in the midst of the same?

The fact that we are not charged with remedying the world of all its ills comes as a freeing thing to the soul. While we are to steward the roles we are assigned in bringing about change, we understand that straightening the dysfunctions of our own selves calls for plenty attention all its own.

March 16, 2017August 28, 2017

Next stop. San Antonio

I nudged the clinic door. It opened and I inched toward a desk behind which sat a dark-haired middle-aged lady. The receptionist. A pain shot through my back at the waist line. My knees buckled but I caught myself, barely dodging a crash to the hardwood floor.

“Óh, sir!” Her concern was genuine. She indicated a chair. “Here. Right here.” I eased into it, contorting my limbs and back in a few deft maneuvers.

“The doctor will see you in just a minute. Another slow turn and I was seated, a trace of perspiration beading my eyebrows. Thanking her with a silent nod, I began filling the first-visit patient form. After a couple entries, I had relaxed enough to reflect on the event sixteen hours that brought me now to this house-turned-clinic.

A wry smile momentarily hijacked my features. If Francis could see me now.

Shortly before our San Antonio move, my co-worker at Tulsa’s North American Aviation had asked what job awaited me in the Alamo City. Now, between winces, I imagined his I-told-you-so if he could meet up with me today in this bone-cruncher establishment (the average chiropractor of the era hoped to see his specialty one day rise above the “snake-oil peddler” status it was often relegated to).

Well, Francis, it’s like this. Down at the corner of Caldera and Bandera there’s this Phillips 66 station. . .

Midafternoon yesterday I had grabbed two car tires, each of them encircling its own heavy rim. Lifting a heavy load while swiveling to another direction defied sound judgment. This insight was shouted to me from that waist line point along my spinal column.

But fifty minutes from entering Dr. Brown’s clinic I left convinced a miracle-worker had signaled magic to my miserable frame. Unlike at my entry, I exited the premises without a whimper. The bone-cruncher enterprise had won my vote.

This early encounter into our South Texas move served as a kind of preview for my wife Ann and me. Twists and turns of our movements ahead would usher in adventure, discovery. Pain would play its role.

How do you turn a Pentecostal into a Baptist, then to something other, and still retain qualities of each.

A fellow with the middle name of Worthy crossed my path. I was never the same.
©2017 Jerry Lout

December 19, 2017December 19, 2017

Redeeming Pain

The mission doctor drew his penlight back from my little girl’s ear and sent me a sympathetic look.

His voice betrayed a strong Dutch accent, “The infection is bad.”

The young doc had recently been assigned to Ombo clinic, a Catholic mission outpost in Migori village. I had brought our three-year-old Julie in this morning, hoping to remedy her nonstop earache. Julie had sat astride my dirt bike’s gas tank the twenty mile ride in. Was it wise exposing her head – especially her ears – to the breeze out there? A little late to ponder that, I thought.

The physician reached for a sharp-pointed instrument I had no interest seeing.

“I need to pierce the ear drum and you will want to hold her firm.”

What followed was one of the necessary and least welcome assignments presented parents of young children all down through the ages. How to explain the act of heaping pain on top of pain – at the hands of the white-coated man whose job was to bring pain’s relief – and at the hands of daddy, nearest thing to hero in the room?

Why daddy? Why do you help this man hurt me? My daughter’s distressed eyes silently begged the answer more strongly than her voice ever could.

I swallowed hard, the fear inside me rising from the insecurity of my youthful fatherhood. I’ve never gotten schooled in this thing going on here. I hoped my voice – it’s ok, sweetheart, it’ll be okay soon – offered some kind of comfort, assurance that all would be well. Indeed, my greater struggle came from within rather than from the physical act of imprisoning my princess in this smothering hold.

Mercifully, the sharp pierce of the surgeon’s device came and went quickly. Julie’s sudden cry cut through the lab facility, echoing harshly in the uncarpeted, brick-walled room. The whimpers soon trailed off and she grew calmer. I rocked her slowly back and forth. The infectious throbbing went away, the pounding pain gone. Her tense body relaxed. She quieted.

Years afterward, the visit to Ombo Clinic prompted me to reflect.

Of God’s most-recognized titles, ‘Father’ must rank the highest.

Thank you Lord that, when I least understand you or your actions, your care and wisdom and presence get me past my confusion and pain. Eventually.

Every time.

July 18, 2018

The Unknowing

“God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience,

but shouts in our pain: it is His megaphone to

rouse a deaf world.” – C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

***

What awaits me down there, really?

A few minutes earlier, as the great aircraft began its descent to Nairobi’s mile-high runway, I had drawn the Navy-blue passenger blanket away from my head and shoulders. The covering had served to conceal a stubborn trickle of tears that had persisted these past minutes.

Inside I knew I had not come to this place entirely on my own. . . knew that God had journeyed together with Ann and me from the outset along this sudden bewildering trail, a pathway ending who knew where? Still, I could not recall in my lifetime bearing such a sense of ‘aloneness’. I sat in a cloister of fellow passengers gazing out the plane’s window onto a land beneath of fifteen million inhabitants. It didn’t matter. Alone is alone regardless the surroundings.

Lord, I do need your presence. Be near me these coming days.

My tired mind went over again the sequence of events these past weeks.

So what is the missing piece, where is the accusation, what is the scandal. . . Is there one? Why would I be disinvited to serve in this land, among this people we’ve grown to care so deeply about?

The grand ball of sun had for an hour been inching its way above the Indian Ocean 200 miles eastward, its revealing light stretching inland, drenching the Nairobi Game Park that lay near the capital city’s airport at the city’s edge. I well knew that giraffe, zebra, antelope and the occasional pride of lion had long wakened to the sun’s encroaching blaze, their animal senses already on high alert. Knew this even as I detected my own protective instincts rising.

Certainly, as with all long-term residents coming from an outside culture, I had made my share of goofs, mis-pronouncing language, klutzy embarrassments that locals regularly let slide. In the end though, search for it as I might, no complaint of my violating any cultural, moral or religious code came to my mind.

Thuh-THUMP. The plane touched down and her sturdy tires soon moved us toward the mobile stairways for our exit.

I was “home”, where I had first landed a dozen years ago. But this was different. . . the first time in my overseas travels without my dear wife. She and our children, thousands of miles distance, would await word of my safe arrival. I felt the sense of aloneness threaten me again. Mercifully, a flight attendant’s voice sounded in a microphone.

“Please take care leaving, ladies and gentlemen, that you remember your carry-on items. And mind the steps as you move down to the tarmac.”

Stepping outside and onto the stairway platform, carry-on in hand, I paused a moment and drank in the Africa air. Then, trailing a chatty group of tourists toward the tarmac below I stole a further look across the Kenya landscape.

How much longer will this be our home?

June 2, 2015August 28, 2017

Prescription – Pain. Somber Prediction

Mom’s fly swatter instruction of past times over my use of bad words met with failure in Hillcrest Hospital’s therapy room.

Hold his hip firm against the table. Steady now. Here we go – Up with the right leg.

Two people in white – a spindly man and a large-boned woman – stood opposite each another at the therapy bench. I lay face-up between them. They applied stretch treatments to paralysis-affected limbs. The therapy helped arrest stiffening of the muscles.

I took in their words. The stretching maneuver was underway. The leg in motion, kept straight as a board by pressure of a hand on my kneecap, rose upward. The stiffer the muscles the greater the strain. And the pain. Up, up until a searing sharpness passed through my leg, prompting me – their child-patient – to bark *%#$! Though not loudly.

The therapists shared knowing but not unkind smiles. Neither spoke. Their tasks – these disguised angels – inflicting pain on helpless children. Surely this brought pain their way.

An Australian nurse, Sister Elizabeth Kenny, had devised an effective treatment to limber up the muscle tissue of paralyzed limbs. Nurses at Hillcrest wrapped me, along with my polio peeps, in confining, steaming hot packs (I close my eyes today and smell the heavy, moist odor of sweltering chamois-like blankets). Mercifully the blankets held my body in their constricting grip for only short periods.

I never swore about the hot packs. As I grew older I extended myself grace over the therapy-table profanity lapse. Though not justified, cursing can slip through a set of teeth in a moment of sharp pain.

Remedial pain. Our world is rich with special Wisdom Sayings when we pause to listen. Some of these coach us about preventing needless pain; others on the actual usefulness of it.

Our limpings – whether of a physical or of a nonphysical nature – can meet with useful pain at times. Yet, we have to pay attention to detect the usefulness.

He who will not be taught by his elders will be taught by the world, African seniors counsel their youth.

No discipline is enjoyable. . it’s painful! But afterward there will be a peaceful harvest of right living for those who are trained in this way. the Bible’s ‘Book of Hebrews’.

My father and mother didn’t discipline me perfectly. Nor have I my own children. Yet, we do our children no favor by withholding loving – and yes unpleasant – correction when needed. Emphasis – Loving. Just as failing to administer pain-inducing treatments to better a patient would, in fact, be unkind.

Still, my condition worsened. From waistline to feet my limbs went useless. My upper body declined, my respiratory muscles weakened. An attending doctor informed my parents I would not walk again. Regardless.

A stuffed black Terrier Pup consoled me – along with one particular nurse. While specialists discussed my case – and the Iron Lung.

Question. What caught your interest most in this post? I’m very interested in thoughts, feelings of any readers. Thanks again for following! Alert! In part due to reader requests, Soon we’ll post Running Life’s Race Twice weekly instead of one per week – doubling the episodes. 🙂

*hot pack photo.nurse: OHSU Historical Collections & Archives