Commiseration

Two weeks ago, after our morning worship service at school, I was helping reset our worship area back to classrooms.  As we have concertina sliding doors that slide from the walls to the middle in our creative arts block, they need to be locked into position so that noise is kept to a minimum and the doors don't swing creating distractions in the three classrooms. 

It had been a frustrating Friday morning already and my mind really wasn't on what I was doing, but as we were closing the last set of doors I began sliding them in the bent position toward the middle.  Unfortunately, the young boy on the other side of the door didn't see my fingers in the metal caps on the edges of the door and he pushed.

Whammo.  As I wasn't even aware until that moment that my fingers were in the crease, the pain was exquisite.  Think of the time when you were doing carpentry and you hit your finger instead.  Can you feel that?  Now, on that same finger, jam a toothpick under the nail as far as you can go...

That's what it felt like to lose the end of it.  I'm not sure how many nerve endings actually have their terminus in the tip of one's finger, but it must be in the billions.  I pulled my finger from the crack and unfortunately found that the tip of it was still in the doors, but I had to get out of there because, well, my stumpy finger was bleeding everywhere. 

People do strange things when they are in shock, I think.  My brain was overloaded with input, my nerve endings were shouting at me, "YOU IDIOT!"; my finger was throbbing already and leaking on my shirt and all that I could think of was...

Where's my bag?  I've got all my books in it.  I don't want to leave that behind. 

Weird, huh?  I wasn't concerned at that point about my tipless index finger, only the fact that I didn't want my school bag to go missing.  My friend Nikki, who is a teacher at Faith, noticed the gore and said, "Maybe you should go to the nurse."  She's smart like that. 

So I dragged myself across campus, satchel hung over my shoulder (I found it) and headed to the nurse's office like a hunchbacked Igor.  Some kids tried to stop me a few questions, but evangelism takes a back seat, I think, during amputations. 

Here I sound like a big baby, and this whole thing is really just a case of 'manpain', because as I write this (without using my left index finger) the skin has begun to grow back over the piece of my finger that was unceremoniously removed.  Eventually, it may not look any different than it used to but on that day, I felt the pain and that was just okay.

What I've found, though, over the last two weeks is that it really isn't a rarity for one to lose a section of one's finger.  In fact, almost every person I've met either has trimmed a digit or knows someone who has lost a section of their hand and they've told me about it.  Whether cases of hunting, carving, squishing, cutting - it doesn't matter - everyone has a story about 'I remember the day when my hand  used to look normal.'

Last Sunday I went to a different church way out in the middle of the country.  The first person to greet me extended his hand.  Sure enough, two finger swallowed by a story of pain.  When I tell people that I caught my finger in a door, they wince for a second, but in some ways, it would be a better story like my friend Skippy.  His real name is Nigel but no one calls him that  Skippy took off the top of his finger the night before his wedding, he found the piece, just like I did, but they put his back on.  He told the story with all the gruesome details and I felt like we new each other's pain.  Every person who has lost a finger is now part of the club - the Stump Club, I guess.  And whenever we get together, we commiserate in the pain of not having the same kind of grasping abilities as we used to.  That's what commiseration really is, isn't it?  Sharing a common story of pain.

I see it all the time, and unless you're part of the club, you can't really understand.  Women who have had children talk about their birthing experiences seemingly every single time they meet and usually, they, just like the boys, try to outdo each other with the painful bits.  They look at us over the bridges of their nose, disdainfully shaking their heads and roll their eyes.  Even a lady at the office, after seeing my finger misery said, "Try having a baby."

No thanks. 

You have to be part of the club to understand.  In order to be part of the healing process, you really have to be there.  So each person that shakes hands with me with parts missing, I can nod in some kind of conspiratorial manner, wink and say, "I'm part of the club too."

But the whole idea of commisery got me thinking the other day - We always talk about how God doesn't understand the pain that we go through, or at least we think about it, and sometimes we speak in platitudes about how God knows our pain because Jesus suffered on the cross, but that's the most difficult thing I struggle with sometimes:  I know that Christ suffered pain on the cross and God knows what it's like to lose life, but where is God in my suffering now?  Where is God in the pain of knowing that even trivial loss for me, like not being able to play guitar for a few months, is like losing a big part of my joyful life.

Fortunately, I think it's this very fact that God sends people to commiserate with us, those that have suffered in similar ways, is how we heal quicker.  It's the reason we have Alcoholics Anonymous, cancer survivor groups, loss of a child groups - hundreds of gathering that occur everywhere for the purpose of commiseration.  Because when loss is shared by those who have gone through it before, new life is found. 

Shared grief equals common healing. 

I thank God for the people who have commiserated with me the last two weeks.  I know that I am not alone.

Maybe you could find someone with whom you share a common grief?  Maybe you'll find new life in commiseration.