Control out Pain by Pastor Ed Young
Now and then, what I have tried to do is, I have tried to act like when we are arguing that everything was cool, that we are not arguing at all, because I don’t want to put myself in a bad light before church member. Image control. Sound familiar?
Then we want to control our problems. People say, “How are you doing?” And we say, “Oh, I’m doing great, man, just great.” Down deep, though, we are dying. We are kind of like the shirt I heard about the other day. It shows a picture of a dead cow. And underneath the cow is saying, “Really, I’m fine.”
We also try to control out pain. God uses pain as an alarm to help us change and oftentimes He will let a crisis or catastrophe occur to get you or I to change. And the sad thing is, it takes that until we really deal with our baggage. I have only bought one thing in my life from the Home Shopping Network. I bought a triathlon watch. The watch was delivered to my house and I could not get the alarm thing to stop going off at odd times, I couldn’t figure it out. So after a couple of nights of being alarmed out of our sleep, I would take this watch, put it in one of my Nike tennis shoes, size 12, put three athletic socks in the Nike tennis shoes, put four towels over it. Still I could hear the beep of the alarm.
Finally I just took it and threw it away. We try to cover pain, we try to camouflage pain. We drink to deaden it, smoke to deaden it, snort to deaden it, eat to deaden it. We get angry, we criticize others. We are in control, you see. Could that be you, could that be me? The root of our problem, we want to control.
