Quotes about Pain

But my experience is that people who have been through painful, difficult times are filled with compassion.

People lie to themselves all the time about what they've been through and what it means - I'm no exception. But you write those lies down - lies that really matter to you and that are really painful to let go of because they've become a part of who you are - and they don't work.

It is painful beyond measure to lose a loving father and grandmother to violence.

My parents' divorce left me with a lot of sadness and pain and acting, and especially humour, was my way of dealing with all that.

Lewis Smedes sums up the dangers of superficial forgiveness: "We will not take healing action against unfair pain until we own the pain we want to heal. It is not enough to feel pain. We need to appropriate the pain we feel: Be conscious of it, take it on, and take it as our own … I worry about fast forgivers. They tend to forgive quickly in order to avoid their pain.

We numb our pain through denial, blaming, rationalizations, addictions, and avoidance.

When we deny our pain, losses, and feelings year after year, we become less and less human.

Pain has an amazing ability to open us to new truth and to get us moving.

Unhealed wounds open us up to habitual sin against God and others.

Mature spiritual leadership is forged in the crucible of difficult conversations, the pressure of conflicted relationships, the pain of setbacks, and dark nights of the soul.

We change our behavior when the pain of staying the same becomes greater than the pain of changing.

Prayer Lord, I have spent much of my life running from pain and loss, medicating my pain and quickly moving on to the next project——the new urgent demand. I ask for the grace to embrace all of life—the joys and the sorrows, the deaths and the births, the old and the new. In Jesus' name, amen.