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Morning Meditation
March 19, 2026
An excerpt from Darcy Steinke’s This is the Door: The Body, Pain, and Faith
I recently saw a woman on the subway with a pink T-shirt that read Pain Changes People. Can we say that transformation is meaningful, even if the pain itself is not? I struggle with the idea that my pain is arbitrary. I wrote this book to try to understand the hardest period of my life, a time when I sometimes did not want to live. I wonder whether our modern, secular idea of pain’s diminished value, its worthlessness, might make pain harder to bear. Although I don’t consider my pain sacred, the stillness it engenders may be. Pain made me realize I was less a creature with a reliable inner identity than a penetrable ecosystem.
Meditation by Rebecca Northington
We have spent the last several weeks discussing suffering in the Redeemer Youth Group. The topic was unavoidable as we processed and absorbed our recent work trip to Washington, D.C., where we primarily served the unhoused. We saw suffering, and as we sat down with those men and women, we heard about their lives and their struggles. It is hard for adults to sit with and witness that kind of pain. It may be more difficult for our young people, sheltered as they are on the mainline, to truly appreciate that these people, whom they might step over on a street in Georgetown as they enter J. Crew, have lives and loved ones just like all of us. But the kids did just that, and their compassion and desire to help improve the lives of these strangers reflects the kind of people they hope to be: hospitable, loving and kind.
When we got back home, we spent time exploring what suffering looks like in our own lives. Societal norms urge us to eradicate suffering, for parents to literally plow it out of the way for children, and for kids to appear perfect, even if they feel less than perfect. Our clothes, bodies, grades, teams, and God willing, college acceptances, all represent this striving towards the impossibility of being free from pain and suffering-of being perfect. Pain is safely allocated to the private spaces of the medical world and therapy. It can get fixed there. Right? How do we behave in this context towards one another? How does pain change us if we pretend it doesn’t exist?
When we turned the conversation of suffering back on ourselves, on our families – our mothers, our fathers, our siblings, friends, and even our enemies, the tone shifted. Many of the kids confessed that they had never considered that their fathers could suffer, and how the challenges that these fathers face might affect how they behave. There was a lot of silence around considering how we could be more compassionate towards our parents or towards those whom we don’t even particularly like. Ask yourself if you give thought to pain or suffering and choose compassion when interacting with someone you don’t particularly like, or someone you assume can take care of themselves?
When we approach people with empathy, rather than defensiveness, hostility or judgement, it changes the outcome of any interaction. When we recognize that “Pain changes people”, we change. In George Saunders new book Vigil, the main character is a chaperone of death. Midway through the book she gives the reader some insight into her character and the nature of her own death, as she observes her killer still living and tormented by his crime.
“Imagine a fellow in manacles: hungry, thirsty, flea-bitten, tormented by his mind in hideous ways. And you (unmanacled, free, comfortable, sane) walk past.
You cannot free him.
But you might comfort him.
I felt a new and powerful truth being beamed directly into me, by a vast, beneficent God, in the form of this unyielding directive:
Comfort.
Comfort, for all else is futility”
There are countless moments in the New Testament where Jesus offers comfort; not judgement, not hostility, not defensiveness. Humanity is a “penetrable ecosystem” as Steinke remarks above. We rely on one-another, we are in relationship with one another. How we interact with one another in intimacy, in community, and globally should be a compassionate response to pain. It is what we hope for ourselves and for our children, that when we, or they, experience suffering, the world will respond with love. “In the end, it is the reality of personal relationships that saves everything” (Thomas Merton).
Prayer
Let us dare to believe that we are as capable
As Mother Theresa, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and even
Jesus, in acts of love and compassion!
But first we must be vulnerable.
We must acknowledge and accept our own fear and
Insecurity before the enormous task of transformation.
Yet still, in the face of God’s grace, we must cherish our possibilities.
It is then, from within our grace-filled trembling, that we
Dare to step forward in trust and tenderness to the
Brokenness of others.
God will transform our small hearts into vessels of great grace.
We are capable of healing the world.
Amen
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