Pain

Pain. As I sit here writing today’s post, I have some serious pain in my chest and left arm. I used to think it was a heart attack and went to the doctor to make sure it wasn’t. After about doing that five or six times, I realized it wasn’t my heart. I found that I have a gluten intolerance and one of my side effects of eating gluten is fibromyalgia. I get serious pains in my chest and arm every time I eat something by mistake that I shouldn’t have eaten. It goes away over time but it’s not fun to go through.

As I go through this pain, I feel bad that I even complain about it, thinking of the pain my Savior went through for me. To be put through a fake trial before the Jewish religious leaders, blindfolded and smacked, have the beard ripped out of His face and spit upon, what do I have to complain about?

After the fake trial, He is taken out into the courtyard, stripped down, and beaten with a cat-of-nine-tails. That’s a whip with shards of bone woven into the end of the straps of the whip. As He’s beaten, the skin of His back is ripped off to the point where His bone is showing through and He is bleeding profusely.

When the whipping is over, He is forced to carry His Cross from the courtyard, where He was beaten, to the Place of the Skull, Golgotha. As He carried His Cross through the streets of Jerusalem and out the gate of the city, the crowds are screaming at Him along His path.

When He gets to the place of His death, He is laid upon the Cross with spikes driven through His wrists and ankles to hold Him up on the Cross until He dies. The crown of thorns still cutting into His skull since the beating He took in the courtyard. There on the Cross, He hangs until He gives up His own life in place of mine. And I have the nerve to complain about this current and temporary pain. God forgive me!