"I wanted faith to work like an epidural; to numb the pain … . As it turned out, my faith ended up being more like a midwife—a nurturing partner who leans into the discomfort with me and whispers 'push' and 'breathe.'"—Brené Brown

New parents have to decide their position on many parenting issues. It wasn't until I became a mother that I realized I had surprisingly strong feelings on the subject of wipe warmers. These devices hold baby wipes, sometimes even with "two heat settings for your baby's preferred comfort." I have no problem if you use a wipe warmer but here's the reason I chose not to use one: The world is an uncomfortable place. It's not my job to ensure my child has no discomfort but to prepare her for it as much as I can. If I have to ensure she never feels a slight sensation of cold during diaper changes, I'm going to be exhausted, trying to keep her from every discomfort.

Which relates to our role as pastors. Is it our job to make sure our people never experience pain? Or to help them navigate and learn from it? Maybe even see it with new eyes?

Pain vs. suffering

Barbara Brown Taylor (An Altar in the World) uses the story of Job to make a helpful distinction between pain and suffering. Job has the reality of his painful situation—boils, poverty, and the death of his children—but then there is the additional suffering of feeling forsaken by God. Job's physical and emotional pain pales in comparison to the suffering brought on by the silence of God. We, as pastors, can rarely alleviate the pain of our people—the anguish of broken relationships, failing bodies, injustices—and so we feel ineffectual. But the power of our calling is revealed when we speak to the suffering that comes from the interpretation of pain.

If a man in our community cannot find a job, it's painful. In addition to the pain of that reality, if he interprets it as God's neglect, it adds intense suffering. If a woman in our community has lost a child, it's excruciating. If, in addition to the pain of that death, she interprets it as a sign of God's judgement, the suffering becomes unbearable. This is where our job is crucial and where we have the opportunity to invite healing in the lives of our listeners.

Responding, not reacting, to pain

Humans are story-tellers, interpreting every experience we have. But our interpretations are invisible to us. Preachers have an opportunity to name false interpretations—we are alone, we are to blame, we are unworthy—and lay a new, Scriptural story over every life—we are loved, we are provided for, we are free. Our sermons can tell new stories about pain.

But how do we gain the pastoral perspective needed to see pain with new eyes, especially when we feel the pain with our people? Our care for them motivates us to alleviate the pain, partly for their sake and partly for our own. But if we're not careful we'll miss a significant moment. If we're not careful, we'll react to the pain instead of responding to it.

Church consultant, Peter Steinke, applies the work of leadership guru, Edwin Friedman to congregational settings, using the story of the golden calf to distinguish between healthy and unhealthy leadership approaches to pain: "Aaron is too sensitive to the people's pain. He wants only to relieve their incessant, nagging complaints. But Moses is on a quest for truth. He will not heal the people's pain with some narcotic or magic. 'The reason, by the way … that Moses has a higher threshold for his people's pain than Aaron is because Moses has vision.' Without clarity people perish in their emotional intensity. They are not challenged to raise their threshold for pain and thereby to respond to life instead of react against it" (Steinke, How Your Church Family Works: Understanding Congregations as Emotional Systems, p 72).

How do we resist the temptation to react to the pain and instead invite our people to respond to it? Only by allowing ourselves to experience our own pain. As John Savage, author of Listening and Caring Skills in Ministry, puts it: "[Y]ou can enter the pain of another only at the level that you can enter your own." There is a deep connection between our threshold for our own pain and our threshold for the pain of others.

Steinke describes four different approaches to pain: a person with toleration of pain in self but low toleration of pain in others often becomes a rescuer who succumbs to "compassion fatigue." On the other hand, a person with low toleration of pain both in self and in others feels helpless, always commiserating with others. A third type is someone who can tolerate pain in others but not in self. This person feels their pain is always worse than everyone else's: "Woe is me." Finally, someone who has toleration for pain in both themselves and others finds a healthy balance, taking care of themselves and also being able to challenge others to do the same.

This final posture is the ideal for a preacher—hard but ideal. Our family background and personality will make particular responses (and imbalances) to pain more habitual so it will take time and purposefulness to find balance. But we don't have to figure this out before we begin sharing our desire for balance, in fact, our congregations will find hope in the ways they watch us wrestling to overcome knee-jerk reactions and choose to live into the belief that God can use pain and heal suffering.

The labor pains of pain/The processing of pain

Last year was a hard year, personally, in our congregation, and across the world. By the time we got to Advent it wasn't hard to talk about the yearning of the season. We saw things in the news, in our neighborhood, and in ourselves that we longed for God to heal. I often found myself saying, "You can only long for so long!" The week leading up to the first Sunday of Advent, I felt a deep weight of all the longing in myself and my congregation. We yearned for our own hearts and bodies to be healed, for our city to be healed, for the church to be healed, and for the violence, poverty, and injustice around the world to be healed. On the day I'd planned to spend focused time in sermon preparation, I just couldn't drag myself out of bed. How to be honest about the pain without adding to the pain? How to speak with hope when I felt so burdened? How to promise that God is good when all seemed to be darkness and brokenness? How to have joy without letting it be tainted by all that is lacking in ourselves, the church and the world? Does God's slowness to answer our prayers mean he's forgotten us? That we've failed? That our story is a lie? The questions kept me weeping in my bed and the sermon went unwritten.

In that pain—and the suffering that grew from my interpretation of it—I came across Jesus' words from John 16:

Very truly, I tell you, you will weep and mourn, but the world will rejoice; you will have pain, but your pain will turn into joy. When a woman is in labor, she has pain, because her hour has come. But when her child is born, she no longer remembers the anguish because of the joy of having brought a human being into the world. So you have pain now; but I will see you again, and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you.

If someone who wasn't in labor experienced the level of pain that labor brings, they could easily assume they were dying. But, when a woman is in labor, she interprets the pain through the lens of her understanding—the pain has purpose, something new is breaking into the world. In that moment, hiding under the covers that Wednesday morning, this insight changed my interpretation of our pain. What if the pain we're experiencing is labor pain as God makes all things new? Although the pain was just as present, my heart grew lighter. We had been interpreting the pain as: God has forgotten us, God hasn't kept his promises, God isn't powerful, God doesn't care. Maybe he doesn't even exist. But now, Jesus' image of a woman in labor gave me a new hope that the pain might have purpose, be productive. This new way to cast my reality alleviated the suffering. And from this insight, my sermon took shape.

The sermon recapped several painful moments from the previous year—a shooting in our neighborhood, sickness in our congregation, the Paris attacks. I wanted to name the hard things we all knew and I resisted the temptation to resolve them. I chose to sit with my congregation in their pain and create a safe place for pain to be processed. But we didn't wallow. I turned the corner towards hope by asking: How can we say, "Pain is real AND God is present?" I shared how I was beginning to see with new eyes, to experience the resurrection God can bring from what feels like death. We ended the sermon with a time of reflection to let the community face the pain together, and ask God to heal our interpretation of it. And as they raised their heads from prayer that Sunday, I saw eyes lighten with a new way of seeing the pain. I knew it mirrored the new light in my own eyes. And from that sermon, with permission to both feel the pain and find healing from the suffering, something was unleashed among the artists in my community, birthing music, poetry, and art.

The preacher as midwife

Our role as preachers is one of a midwife, guiding others through their pain. Just as the best midwives are those who have, themselves, experienced birth pains, the best preachers are those who know pain. We owe it to our congregations to risk facing our own pain, trusting that God wants to begin in us what he longs to do in others. As we allow God to heal the suffering that is attendant to our own pain, we will learn, firsthand, the way he can do it for others. The valley of death and dying will become familiar terrain and its terror will fade as we tread that path over and over, adding the interpretation: "I will not fear for he is with me." Each time we do, we will know it more deeply.

God's favorite story is death and resurrection. We can join him in the telling of it: "So much is broken but behold! He makes all things new!"

Mandy Smith is the pastor of St Lucia Uniting Church in Brisbane, Australia, and author of The Vulnerable Pastor: How Human Limitations Empower Our Ministry and Unfettered: Imagining a Childlike Faith Beyond the Baggage of Western Culture. Her latest book, Confessions of an Amateur Saint: The Christian Leader's Journey from Self-Sufficiency to Reliance on God, releases in October 2024. Mandy teaches for The Eugene Peterson Center for Christian Imagination and Fuller Seminary. Learn more at www.TheWayIsTheWay.org.