For Wilshire Baptist Church
“Let your pain be your guide.”
Those were the last instructions my orthopedic surgeon gave me before releasing me from his care in August. Six months earlier he had chiseled away a bone spur inside my shoulder joint and stitched up the rotator tendon that the spur had torn. Surgery was followed by 17 weeks of physical therapy to stretch me from no movement at all to complete range of motion. The therapy sessions ended somewhat artificially because insurance coverage played out, but my surgeon declared me ready to get on with life with that one proviso: “Let your pain be your guide.”
I’ve followed his advice and I’ve been fine for the most part. I still have soreness with some activities that require lifting, reaching, pushing and pulling – sometimes I even have an “uh oh” moment when I think maybe I overdid it – but I’m trusting the surgeon’s words. I take comfort in the fact that he was smiling as he said them – at least with his eyes. It’s a feature of COVID that I never saw his face, but I learned to read his eyes and the tone of his voice.
So, I’ve gotten on with my life except for mowing the lawn, and that will be a big test. I’ve been content to let two men mow and edge from the week of surgery until now. They’ve done a great job for a reasonable price and I especially appreciated them during the near-record heat wave. But now, we’re coming to the end of the mowing season and I’m sort of stuck as to whether I should let them finish out the year or jump back in myself. I know I need to get back to doing it sometime – and I want to because I enjoy doing it – but in the back of my mind I’m afraid I could injure my shoulder, even though the doctor said, “Let your pain be your guide.” And I know he wasn’t saying, “Don’t expose yourself to pain.” I’m confident he was saying, “Go ahead and stretch yourself. You won’t injure yourself, and you might actually find you can do more than you did in the past.”
That was on my mind this week as I looked out the window and watched the mowers, but I had another thought too. I wondered how that principle – “Let your pain be your guide” – applies to other areas of our life? I wondered how it might be applied to emotional and spiritual pain, or even financial pain? How often do we stay safe and not risk the pain that may come if we stretch ourselves? And if we stay safe, what are we missing on the other side of the pain or at least out there on the edges of pain?
I can say that in my own life, if I had not risked emotional pain, I would not have married again and I would have missed an amazing decade with LeAnn. If I had not risked spiritual pain, I might still be sitting on the sidelines at a church that is not fully committed to sharing Christ with “every body.” If I had not risked financial pain, I would not have left a full-time job in communications and made room for other types of writing that feed my soul and maybe speak to others.
Of course, the hope with my shoulder is that someday there will be no pain at all, at least not related to the previous damage and repair. There likely will be new pain as I exert myself and stretch other muscles and tendons.
While I still was in physical therapy, I saw a woman at a restaurant with her arm in a sling and I asked her if she’d had a tendon repaired. She said she had recently, but her big news was that the other shoulder had been repaired first. It was a slow recovery with residual soreness, but then one day it just quit hurting. She said that gave her the courage she needed to get the other shoulder repaired.
There’s no guarantee that my shoulder will quit hurting, just as there is no guarantee that the other pains we endure won’t continue to flare up from time to time. But the best chance we have of recovery or at least reaching a level of tolerance – and the best chance to experience growth – is to keep stretching ourselves.