Don’t play in the water,
reminds the voice of caution.
You’re not prepared
in your silken slippers.
The mud will ruin
your clothes.
Stay away from the puddle,
no good can come
from sitting in the
muddy pool
water up to your eyeballs.
You could
die!
It may be deeper
than you know,
back up,
gather your skirts and run!
You could drown
in it.
But what if they’re
wrong?
The puddle of pain
my schooling
where the minnow
learns to swim,
the pollywog
finding its legs
straining
stretching
becoming.
I think I will sit here
with my pain
and learn what I need
to know.
A little water
won’t kill
me.
It’s our inherent reaction to run from pain, to avoid it at all costs, but pain finds us, and we have no choice but to confront it. If life is a coin, pain and sorrow are on one side just as surely as joy and fulfillment are on the other.
Would we be better off accepting that pain is part of life? I’m not suggesting we wallow in the difficult things that come our way, but neither should we run from them our whole lives so we never truly live for fear of pain.
I wonder if we could learn to sit with the pain of our emotions longer and learn from them instead of trying to shed ourselves of them prematurely? It’s like the figurative hot potato we want to toss before it burns our hands.
Pain can be our teacher, even if it takes years to understand what the lesson was. And sometimes, there may be no apparent lesson other than the fact that life on this side of heaven has pain attached to it. And maybe the nearest thing we can learn and be witness to is the presence of Jesus, who holds us afloat in the pain. That, too, is a lesson worth learning.
Mary Folkerts is mom to four kids and wife to a farmer, living on the southern prairies of Alberta, where the skies are large and the sunsets stunning. She is a Proverbs 31 ministries COMPEL Writers Training member and is involved in church ministries and music. Mary’s personal blog aims to encourage and inspire women and advocate for those with Down Syndrome, as their youngest child introduced them to this extraordinary new world. For more inspiration, check out Joy in the small things https://maryfolkerts.com/ or connect on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/maryfolkerts/