A Blog About Pain, More or Less

I have problems. You have problems. We all have problems. Everybody hurts. Everybody bleeds. Everybody cries.

"Stop whining!” someone may say. “There are other people with far worse problems than you; people with less money, more loss, more pain, more grief, etc.!"

Of course there are. There are people with problems far worse than mine, and those with problems far less than mine. But there is something that does not change, however. We all hurt, we all bleed, we all cry,  and sometimes we deal with our hurts better than others.

A few years ago I had been talking with some friends about some of the situations I was dealing with. I was caretaker to my mother, who was suffering with cancer. I had to watch her suffer pains I hadn't though imaginable, and endure emotional pains the extent of I hadn’t imagined I’d ever feel, feeling helpless all along. Then during all of this my car was stolen right out of my parking lot. One man I was talking with expressed shame that he had been complaining of his own problems just a few moments earlier, problems he now deemed minor in comparison.

I corrected him quickly. I said, "If you broke your arm, it would hurt pretty bad, right? If I broke my arm in two places, a rib, and a leg, does that make your arm hurt any less? And then if somebody else broke both arms, both legs, and four ribs, does that make my broken arm, rib, and leg hurt any less?”

 Be thankful if your pains are less than someone else's, but don't think for a minute that your pains don't matter, too.