Painkillers

The devil deals in painkillers.

If you've ever had one of those days that wears you down until you feel like only a shadow of what you want to be, then you'll know what I mean.  Our sin is a cancer, fed by the things that tempt us.  It starts in one place and, if left untreated, spreads.  It kills us slowly and from within, taking things that were intended for good and mutating them so that they strangle the life from us.

We are desperate to make the pain go away... lucky for us, painkillers are cheap and easy to come by.  They are available in many forms: television, drugs, relationships, idols, cutting, partying...

The first time we take them, we are shocked by how well they work.  Our symptoms fade, and we manage to convince ourselves that our disease does as well.  But as the drugs wear off and the pain returns, we become more desperate to escape it.  We take another hit.  Soon we can't live without the drug.  We take higher dosages.  We take it more and more often.  We mix in other painkillers.

The truth is, we know we need surgery to remove the cancer, but even the idea of it is enough to make us panic.  Instead we lie to ourselves until we really do believe that substituting painkillers is the cure.  But we are the glassy-eyed, emancipated drug addicts, numbing ourselves to the pain that should be warning us to walk away.  We fight to forget our symptoms, but we are only making the disease worse.

When we finally give in to the surgery, we have already been taught to believe that we will never be cured.  We have bought into the lie that we can only fight off death for so long.  But God is a master surgeon, and when we wake up, we find ourselves new and whole again.  We find ourselves more healed than we had ever dared to hope was possible.  We are given new hearts, and new blood courses through our veins.

When we learn to stop fearing the cure, we free ourselves from suppressing the pain.  We open ourselves up to be cured.  The change is more than a transplant; it is a transformation.

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