Pain changes people. When you have a plain, ordinary headache, it wrecks your day and you can act differently. When people have excruciating back pain, day after day, they are not the same person they were without it. When you have pain, there's only one thing on your mind ... relief.

When you are dealing with horrible pain, you don't care to hear much from people who have never had it. What do they know about it? You try to be polite when they talk to you, but inside you cringe. They will never know what you are going through.

During the next few months at our Vision4Life Sundays we will be discussing Problems with the Bible. At our last group-work together I heard some people relate their difficulties to the book of Psalms. I share with you some thoughts on the following psalm.

The Bible is full of pain — pain of all kinds. Many of the psalms are anguished cries from people who are tormented. Psalm 55 stands out as one that is about psychological distress. We associate it with David, and there were times in his life when he screamed to high heaven because of the way events were going against him. The writer of the psalm is distraught, cringing before the terrors of death, shaking with fear and trembling, crying out to God in his distress.

In this regard, then, the writer is every one of us. Most people go through times like these. And those of us who know the cruelty of physical pain cannot help being somewhat startled by the simple command at the end of the psalm: "Cast your cares on the Lord and He will sustain you." Sufferers wouldn't take this from just anyone; they would have to know that the person speaking to them had been through agony. Well, we know that's true in this case. And the writer here, himself doubled up in misery, says, "Give it over to the Lord."

"Cast your cares on the Lord." The Hebrew word for 'cares' here is used only once in the Bible. It refers to cares in the broadest, widest sense — not just the specific item that causes your discomfort right now, but that item and all the other cares you have.

Will that help? Well, there it is in black and white and sustained by the Holy Spirit: God will sustain.

We are to cast everything on God — all our stresses and troubles — and he will respond with what is needed to carry us through. He may take the pain away; he may not. But one thing is certain: he will sustain faith-filled people when they turn their everything over to him.

We must understand that these are not just words here, as though they are a suitably spiritual response dreamed up by a poet as something that would make a good ending for a poem dealing with agony. This is the Holy Spirit's word sent our way by the God who suffered more than any of us ever will.

We who suffer now must turn our everything over to Christ, and He will sustain us as He was sustained. Can we ask for anything more?

Grace and Peace,

Bill