When the Wounds Remain If God is good, why do wounds remain? Pain can feel like evidence against love. Is it? I want to begin by saying that this is an honest question, and it deserves an honest answer. I am not going to pretend that pain is easy, or that a few tidy verses make the ache go away. Pain is real. Wounds are real. And there are seasons when they can feel like the strongest evidence we have that God is either not there, not good, or not paying attention. I have felt every one of those things. So let me not answer this from a distance, but from the middle of my own scars. Here is what I have come to believe after many years of walking with the Lord through both small wounds and unspeakable ones: pain is not proof that God does not love us. Very often, it turns out to be the very place where His love is proven. Not All Pain Is the Same The first thing worth noticing is that we do not actually treat all pain as evil. We only treat some of it that way. Think of the person who goes running before sunrise, lungs burning, legs aching. Think of the one who lifts weights until their muscles tear, on purpose, so that they can grow back stronger. Nobody drags them there. They choose that pain, willingly, week after week, because they can see what is on the other side of it. They can see the benefit clearly enough that the pain becomes worth it. Nobody looks at an athlete's discipline and says, "How cruel." So the problem is not always the pain itself. Very often the problem is that we cannot see what the pain is producing. We feel the burning, but we cannot see the muscle forming underneath. Scripture tells us that our trials are doing exactly that kind of hidden work. Peter says that the tested genuineness of our faith is "more precious than gold that perishes though it is tested by fire" (1 Peter 1:7). Here is my honest guess: if we could see, even for a moment, just how much our trials are growing us, how they are forging a faith worth more than gold, a faith that will still be standing on the other side of eternity, I think we would choose them the same way the runner chooses the road. We would stop asking God to remove every hardship and start trusting the One who knows what He is building. The Thorn and the Comfort The apostle Paul knew this tension from the inside. He carried what he called "a thorn in the flesh," something painful enough that he begged the Lord three times to take it away. And the answer he received was not the removal he asked for, but this: "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness" (2 Corinthians 12:9). The thorn stayed. But so did the grace, and Paul came to say he would rather have the weakness with Christ's power resting on him than the ease without it. Then, just a few chapters earlier, Paul tells us something I have found to be profoundly, experientially true. He calls God "the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God" (2 Corinthians 1:3–4). Read that slowly. So much of our suffering unlocks a particular comfort from the Holy Spirit, a comfort we would never have known had we not first been in the affliction. And that comfort is not given only for us. It is given so that we can turn and hand it to someone else who is suffering in any way at all. Your wound becomes the exact shape of the comfort you can offer another wounded person. Pain, in the hands of God, stops being a dead end and becomes a doorway. The Refiner Who Never Looks Away The prophet Malachi gives us a picture I keep returning to. He says the Lord "will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver" (Malachi 3:3). If you have ever heard how silver is refined, you will understand why this comforts me. The refiner holds the silver in the fire, but he never walks away from it. He watches it closely, constantly, because if it is left in the heat too long it will be destroyed. He knows the precise moment to draw it out. That is our Father. He is not a distant God who lets us burn and forgets us. He is a loving Father who watches over every trial with the closest possible attention. He never allows anything so great that it would destroy us. And all the while He is refining, He is reminding us that the fire is not the end of the story, that ultimate comfort and joy are promised to us on the far side of eternity, where there will be no more thorns at all. Wounds That Become Monuments Here is where my own story comes in. For a long time I had a blood tumour on my nose. It was not pretty, and it was not pleasant. Time and time again it would swell up and grow, and then it would burst, releasing a great deal of blood. I went to a local skin specialist and had it cut out, but that only fixed things for a while. It seemed to be coming back with vigour. Then some friends at my Bible study prayed for me. And it was healed. Miraculously, completely healed. To this day there is a mark on my nose that does not quite look right. It is, in a manner of speaking, a wound. But it is a wound I would not trade for anything, because every time I catch it in the mirror it reminds me that the ultimate Physician reached down and healed me, for free, when the specialists could not. That little imperfection is not a scar of defeat. It is a monument of His faithfulness. Wounds that were once only painful have a way of becoming exactly that: standing stones that testify, God was faithful to me here. The Deeper Wound But I would be dishonest if I only told you about the small wounds. There is a far deeper one. When I was five years old, I watched my father be murdered in front of me. I will not pretend to fully understand why the Lord allowed that. But I can testify, over the long stretch of many years, to how He has met me in it, and even brought good out of a place I once thought was only darkness. He has answered my prayers and He has filled the blank spaces that loss carved into my life. First, He did this through His Word. In Psalm 68:5 He tells us that He is "Father of the fatherless." I want you to know that I am a living witness that this is completely, literally true. He has been a Father to me. And second, He meets me in the sadness itself. There are certain days when the grief still descends: Father's Day, or the anniversary of the day I lost him. On those days He does not stand back. He surrounds me and fills me with His presence, and in doing so He reminds me of something I now hold with everything in me: what my heavenly Father gives me can never, ever be taken away. Never Attribute to God the Work of Satan That deeper wound leads me to something I believe is one of the most important truths in this whole discussion, and I plead with you to hear it. We must never attribute to God the work of Satan. Jesus said it plainly: "The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life and have it abundantly" (John 10:10). There are two very different hands at work in this world. One comes to give life, and to give it to the full. The other comes to steal, to kill, and to destroy. For many years, whenever I considered the pain of losing my father, my heart would rage against God, if I even believed He was out there, or that He cared at all. But there was a possibility I had never once opened my mind to: that this gruesome act of murder was not the Father's doing at all. It was the work of the enemy. Murder does not come from the hand that gives abundant life. It comes from the thief. So, dear brother or sister in Christ, kindly and prayerfully assess the pain in your life. Sometimes, if we are honest, we dig our own holes and then fall headlong into them. Sometimes the Lord in His wisdom allows a pain that will genuinely grow us and help us in the long run, the way a refiner allows the fire. But never, never ever, hang around your Father's neck the pain that was bought by our hateful enemy. Do not blame the God who came to give you life for the destruction that came from the one who came to take it. Wounds Reflect the Wins I want to leave you with the picture that settles this whole matter for me. In the book of Revelation, we are shown the risen and reigning Jesus. He is victorious. He is glorified. And yet He still bears the marks of the nails. The scarred hands remain. Real wounds. Real pain was embraced to earn them; nothing about the cross was gentle. But those scars are not signs of defeat. They are the very sign of the most powerful victory that God has ever won. When we see the wounds in the hands of the risen Christ, we are not looking at evidence that love failed. We are looking at the proof that love conquered. So, does pain prove that God does not love us? I no longer believe that it does. If anything, the deepest wounds in history (His, and in their small way, ours) keep turning out to be the places where His love and His triumph are most clearly displayed. Wounds often reflect the wins.
Romans 8:18–28
