Living In the Presence of God

Over the last several months, a dull pain in my right hip had gotten steadily worse. Ibuprofen, helped me to ignore its nagging, but the pain kept returning. “I am too busy to be bothered with this,” I told myself. “I don't have two or three free hours to waste in a doctor’s office?” I rationalized. “I will suffer through,” the martyr in me decided. In my heart, I was making excuses. I did not want to be bothered with finding out the cause of the pain. Subconsciously, I think I feared the diagnosis, or felt the treatment would be too time-consuming. Over the next several months the pain increased, and eventually I made an appointment with my doctor who referred me to a physical therapist.

After a few minutes in the physical therapist’s waiting room, a slender, bright, cheery woman called me back into her office. After asking several questions, she listened intently to my symptoms, gently examined the affected area, and then confidently told me the cause of my pain: A misalignment of my hips. Without hesitation, she asked me to do a few maneuvers on the examination table. With the last maneuver, I heard three pops in my hip. When I stood back up, she asked me, “How do you feel?” Amazed, I replied, “The pain is gone!” She saw the relieved excitement on my face and warned, “This is your fix. The pain will come back, but when it does, do these three maneuvers, and you should realign your hips again. Eventually, after doing a series of exercises, you will strengthen the muscles which will hold your hips in place and get rid of the pain.” After making a follow-up appointment, I went home excited and eager to start working on the exercises she had given me.

Each morning, I awoke motivated to do my hip strengthening exercises realizing this was my ticket to a pain-free hip. When the pain returned, I performed the hip-aligning maneuvers to relieve it. With each visit, my physical therapist gave me encouragement along with new and more challenging exercises. My hips began to stay aligned with little pain. On my last visit, my physical therapist nonchalantly explained, “To keep your hip aligned you need to do these exercises for the rest of your life.” “I don’t know if I can maintain this enthusiasm about these exercises for the rest of my life.” I told her. Her response took me back, “You will if the pain comes back.” The returning pain would be my reminder to keep up the exercises.

The way that I reluctantly made a doctor’s appointment to determine the cause of the pain in my hip is how I so often deal with the pain of sin in my life. I try to ignore it or make excuses or rationalize away my sin. When I am impatient with my kids, or angry with my husband, or irritable because life is not going the way I think it should, I treat my sin with a little “pain medicine.” I lie to myself, making excuses, blaming others for my sin. It’s PMS, I tell myself. It’s disobedient children or a selfish husband, I rationalize. When the pain of my sin gets too difficult to bear, and I make an "appointment" with my heavenly father, He eagerly invites me in. He listens carefully to my problems and diagnosis my sin. With his forgiveness, my pain goes away.

The exercises God gives me include regularly reading the Bible, praying continuously, and fellowshipping with other believers.  When I begin to struggle with sin, I am reminded of my constant need to be in fellowship with my Savior.  The sin will always be in my life, but He gives me the means to keep it at bay. I want to approach my relationship with God in the same way I am approaching the pain in my hip, with diligence and with the belief that straying from his Word will have a similar effect that the misalignment had on my hip: much unnecessary pain.