The Pain Which Nobody Understands

Why Your Pain Is Personal but Not Exceptional, and How God Can Use It

There is a pain which nobody understands...

Not too long after our first daughter died in the womb, one day before her due date, I got together with a good friend. The entire family was still very much grieving. Her death had been a shock. There had been no warning signs. When she was delivered, she was not malformed in any way, shape, or form, just covered in a lot of blood. It was one of the defining moments in our family’s history. We were still in the early days, so it was good to get together with a friend.

My friend was a good man who also had pain related to his oldest daughter. She was beautiful like her mother, but a fairly low-functioning autistic girl. He opened up to me about how difficult life was. She didn’t sleep at normal times and would be up through the middle of the night. She was capable enough to unlock doors and get into just about everything. This was very hard for them as a married couple and for her younger siblings. I think there were multiple siblings, but there was at least one little sister.

He was frustrated with his church not understanding. They had rightly asked whether he was disciplining her, because there is a temptation for parents with disabled children to go softer on them than they should. He assured me that he had, and I believed him. He went on to explain his frustration with how the church just didn’t understand what they were going through.

In my head, I thought to myself, neither did I.

So I asked him, well, you don’t know what it’s like to have a daughter die, do you? And he agreed that he didn’t. And I said I can’t imagine what it’s like to have a beautiful girl who is low-functioning but capable enough to disturb all of life and put herself in constant danger. How could I? I can only kind of get at it by thinking through it. Then I urged him to consider that it was at least partially his responsibility to help them understand as best he could. He took my exhortation in stride, and it was a refreshing shared cup of coffee in an otherwise gloomy season of my life.

Again, there is a pain which nobody understands.

I knew a young man who had been pursuing a girl all his life, and she finally said yes, only for her to get cancer and die a couple months later.

I know a man who in his younger years was an abusive father and husband, only to get saved in his 60s, have a major heart change, and now find that his grown children and grandchildren want nothing to do with him. He had a big family, but he was all alone.

I know barren couples who would make lovely parents. They love babies. They love that their friends have babies, but they struggle seeing what they love because it hurts.

There are loveless marriages. There are decades of migraines that wear you down. There is the big investment opportunity that was a lie and wrecked your finances forever.

There are near-infinite sources of pain, many of which you won’t experience, but someone you know will.

Can you truly understand a pain you’ve never experienced?

It depends what we mean by understand. For most of us, we can imagine it theoretically by relating it to some other pain we’ve experienced that, though different, serves as a kind of benchmark.

After our daughter died, a girl I worked with, kind of a sorority-girl type, tried to relate to my pain by talking about how her dog had died. At first, I found this annoying. There is no equivalence between a child and a pet. But at that point in her life, that was the deepest pain she had known. As clumsy as it was, it was a genuine effort to relate. So I chose not to be offended. She just couldn’t understand.

Another phrase I heard a lot in the year after the baby died was that people couldn’t imagine what it was like. More than a few times I quipped back, “Give it time.”

I didn’t mean that they would experience the exact same pain. What I meant was that they would experience a pain that nobody understands, their pain. Something that reminds you every morning that this world is not how it ought to be. Something that reminds you of your deep need for the gospel of Jesus Christ. Something that makes you yearn for the resurrection.

Our pain can bitter us. It can make us self-focused. It can make us angry that others just don’t get it. It can frustrate us when they try to relate in ways we think cheapen what we’re going through. We can allow that to happen. Or we can accept that unique suffering is part of human existence until the day all things are made right.

Related to this is the way pain can become a little too precious to us.

How many people end up defining themselves by a food allergy, a chronic condition, or a very real trauma that happened years ago? How often does that become the place all their conversations eventually lead? We live in an age where you are your trauma. To tell someone they need to mature to the point where they are not finally defined by it is treated as an attack on their identity.

But you do have to learn to deal with pain in a faithful way.

If you lost your sight, or were never able to have children, or your spouse has gone ahead of you to be with the Lord, that is part of your enduring reality. It doesn’t go away. It shapes your life. Pretending otherwise is dishonest.

At the same time, there’s a real difference between “getting over” something, as if you could just ignore it, and learning to deal with it in a godly way. Faithfulness doesn’t mean denial. It means refusing to let suffering become the organizing center of who you are.

Sometimes that pain that nobody else seems to understand becomes the very means by which you’re able to minister to others who are convinced their suffering is unique. You can speak to them with credibility, not theory. You’ve been there in a way.

And in doing so, you’re able to lead them out of the darkness of self-preoccupation and back into the good gifts the Lord still has for them in this life, and into hope fixed on the far greater things He has prepared for them in the world to come.