Favor With KingsSample

Pain

What bad news have you received? What is your deep pain? Is there an ache in your soul? You may have moved on and dealt with it in a healthy way, but pain still shapes our experience of life.

And pain, if dealt with honestly, will lead us to our greatest passions.

Maybe you know immediately what your great pain is. Maybe there are too many to choose from. Or perhaps you’ve been spared tragedy up to this point in your life. But pain is inevitable.

I recently heard a comedian talk about the pain she’d lived through. She said that pain will always sting but that she’s decided to view pain as a gift—it gives her great material!

That’s one way of looking at it. Here’s an even better way. God doesn’t waste pain. In fact, pain is often the catalyst for the greatest contributions.

Pain might be telling you something. Have you been listening? Are you leveraging the pain of your past for the sake of progress?

Maggie and Beth talked to numerous young women in our church and listened to their concerns and insecurities around not knowing how to cook. They promptly started a group that met in their kitchens and began teaching younger moms how to make meals for their growing, busy families on a budget.

Blake Mycoskie started TOMS Shoes after traveling to Argentina and seeing children running the streets with bare feet. Realizing this was a global poverty issue and believing that he had the capacity to do something about it, Blake pioneered the now famous business model called One for One—you purchase one pair of shoes, and his organization gives another pair to a child in need.

C. S. Lewis said, “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world."

What about you? What breaks your heart? Have you heard God shout? Is there bad news that lingers, compelling you to do something?

Remember, you’re doing something is part of this process. It doesn’t have to be “big.” The size and scope of your project doesn’t matter. What matters is that you follow the path and leverage the principles laid out in Nehemiah.

Read and you forget. See and you understand. Do and you make a difference.

Your project might become a for-profit company, a nonprofit organization, a ministry of a church, a community-engagement opportunity, a corporate Skunk Works effort, a weekend activity, an online campaign, a social movement, or any number of things. The possibilities are endless.

Choose to do work that matters. Ask the question, How are things really? Allow bad news to spark good works.

It’s time.