Thoughts on Unnecessary Pain

The sun dances in everything green here—and that means it dances in everything because everything here is lush green. It is a nice change from Utah winter. Today D6 and her two children took me to Tilden Park where we rode an old fashioned real-carved-wooden–horse-merry-go-round, visited the small animal farm, climbed on the playground equipment and had a picnic lunch under the sun.

I’m still watching people, but today I was drawn to my nineteen-month-old grandson. He is walking, but is very unsure of his step and wobbly. He fell often, but got right back up and kept on going. I watched, especially at the playground, as other toddlers his age waddled and fell, waddled and fell, and waddled and fell some more. Watching them is a great lesson in unnecessary pain, and I couldn’t help but think about how few of us would walk if we didn’t have the strength to do it until we were eight or nine years old.

By nine or ten reasoning power has kicked in enough that many people would stop trying to walk because they noticed that people laughed at them when they tried. Or other people would look at mom and dad walk and think, “There’s no way I can ever do it as good as them so why try?” Others would give up with the thought, “Falling down hurts too much. I can’t keep trying to do this.” Still others would sit and watch everyone else attempt to walk thinking, “If God intended me to walk, I would have been born walking. Walking is unnatural.”

In each of these cases and others (I’ll bet you can think of more!) people would give up on walking and content themselves with crawling forever. But their fear of passing through the necessary pain of learning to walk, would not allow them to escape pain, it would only take them into a different kind of pain—unnecessary pain. Crawling would be hard on hands, knees and feet, but the physical pain isnt' all that would cause pain. Crawling around would always give them feelings of inadequacy. They wouldn’t have the self-confidence walking people had. They’d always be humiliated and constantly be working to convince themselves and others that they were really all right.

But because we learn to walk before we learn to reason, we all learn to walk.(Hallelujah!) How wonderful it would be if we approached all areas of our lives like that. The talents we would all have! The abilities! But most of all how wonderful it would be to live without all that unnecessary pain we heap upon ourselves because of the way we reason and refuse to grow!