Why are you hiding your pain? (There’s a better option.)

“There’s no agony like bearing an untold story inside of you.”

-Zora Neal Hurston

I see you hiding in your pain. I’ve always tried to hide my pain too. It’s my go-to, and quite frankly, it’s generational. I come from a long line of professional pain hiders and emotion cover-uppers. 

Growing up, I watched my parents fight behind closed doors. I know every household is different, but in our home, the quieter and more concealed my parents were being, the worse the state of our reality actually was.

If we walked in after school to a house seemingly empty and silent, only to find my parents whispering behind closed doors, it meant they were concealing something, that what they were saying and feeling was so bad it was unrecoverable. It was always the first sign that our life as we knew it was about to be upended.

I have many memories myself of doing the same. 

Taking breaks from other women’s bridal showers to cry in the bathroom because, behind closed doors, my own marriage was falling apart. (And all those silly games played and the shiny new silverware from my own bridal registry had done absolutely nothing to prepare me for what I was now faced with.) 

I’ve miscarried behind closed doors as well. This last time, while filming for our church. There I was, smiling, making lighthearted comments as I honored families in our church, all while stuffing down everything tumultuous going on inside of me. That is until the camera turned off and I could fall in a heap and erupt with all of my anger and questions, yet again, on the other side of the bathroom door.

And as I always did, I would stay in there, just like my parents did, and likely their parents before them, until my face was no longer red and blotchy from the tears, and until I could regain my smile and the effervescence everyone expected from me at that moment.

Stuff it down. Pretend. And when you can’t, hide away until you can. Rinse and repeat. All while the turmoil grew – and grew – inside of me.

I think we all do this to some extent. At times we all feel the pressure to excuse ourselves and our pain from the world and hide our mess behind closed doors. 

The problem is, what happens when the pain doesn’t go away? What happens when our season of grief stretches years, a decade or longer even, and still you have no reprieve? What if relief never comes? What happens when we have made it our go-to to recoil back and hide away when we’re in pain? …do we stay in hiding forever? 

These are the questions I’ve been faced with. It’s why for the last handful of years I’ve stepped farther and farther away from social media and blogging. Because, at times, things inside of me were too unspeakably bad. 

I remember the old adage every mother has spoken to their child at one point or another: If you can’t find something nice to say then don’t say anything at all. And so I waited, to find something nice to say. The problem is, nice words never came.… Fiery words came. Loaded words came, but nice words? Not even close.

And so I made a choice: hide away until things got better. Until the dust settled, the storm was over, and my face was no longer red and blotchy from all my crying. Then, I dreamed, I could reemerge into the world, with sunshine on my face, flowers in my hair, and answers to my biggest faith questions (that probably rhyme, because the most eloquent and lovely words always do).

The problem is, there has been no resolution to my problems, still no answer to my prayers, and no relief from my heartache. I’m still very much in a storm, my heart is still deeply shattered over so many things I thought God in His power would have redeemed by now….

But instead, God proposed a different option to me, and I think it’s the same thing He wants to offer to you in your own attempts to cover up your pain.

God said, “What if instead of hiding your pain, you choose to be honest about it?”

(…it’s what Jesus did.)

In the Garden of Gethsemane, hours before He was to be crucified, we find Jesus anguished and distressed. And it’s in His distress, that Jesus then shares these vulnerable words with His closest friends, words you too may have felt in your own heartache or have scribbled in your own private journal at one time or another:

 “[Jesus] told them, ‘My soul is crushed with grief to the point of death…’” (Matthew 26:38)

Crushed with grief — Those 3 words are few but loaded. They are translated from the word Peripulos which comes from the words Peri and Lupe. Lupe means sorrow, and Peri means all around, on every side. 

The word Peripulos is found multiple times in the Bible, once describing the crowd that surrounded Jesus when he walked from town to town. And another verse describes a belt around your waist. 

By choosing to use the word Peripulos to describe his pain, Jesus was saying, quite literally, He was surrounded by sorrow. 

Jesus was acknowledging, in His own pain and ours, that sometimes due to the difficult things we are forced to walk through in this life we might not only experience sorrow in our lives, but we can also become engulfed by it. We can have unrelenting trials and heartaches coming at us from seemingly every side, making our grief not only overwhelming but inescapable. Inescapable, no matter how hard we have tried to hide and pretend away our pain. 

Here are two takeaways from this passage that have comforted me in my own season of deep sorrow (and my prayer is that they comfort you in yours.):

1. Being fully perfect did not exempt Jesus from feeling anguish

I’m not going to lie, when my own anguish washes over me, the first thing I think is something is wrong with me. Or worse, I believe the lie that Someone up there is punishing me. 

We do this all of the time, do we not? We look at the broken pieces of our lives and the first thing we do is scramble to find our misstep, certain we must have done something wrong, and that there’s no way we could still be within God’s perfect plan for our lives.

But we can find comfort knowing no one could ever follow God closer than Jesus (read: no one is going to get more gold stars on his behavior chart for being obedient) yet here we find Jesus both fully and completely in God’s will for his life and simultaneously crushed by what He has to endure.

2. Jesus didn’t hide His sorrow (far from it)

Another thing that is encouraging is what Jesus did in this sorrow. 

Matthew 26:38 begins by saying, “He told them,  ‘My soul is crushed with grief to the point of death…’”

What did Jesus do when His soul was crushed? He told of it.

You see, Jesus didn’t hide his humanness behind closed doors. Yet how often as Christians is that what we strive to do? So often we aspire to glide through life’s cruelties and disappointments as if we are impenetrable to those watching. We hide behind our flower-overlayed Bible verses and our filtered photos on Instagram, all while our marriages and mental states are secretly crumbling. Hiding away so that no one sees the pain and questions we’re ashamed of. 

Maybe someone told you your faith requires that of you. Like a soldier getting his marching orders, you are to just take what’s given to you by the man in charge, without question, emotion, or upheaval–others may have required that from you, but I’m here to tell you God does not. God didn’t require Jesus to swallow His pain and His questions, to stuff down His feelings in the name of faith, or declare rhyme-y tweetable wisdom over his deepest anguish in hopes it would make it all magically disappear. And if God didn’t require that of Jesus, why would He require more from you?

Jesus neither deserved the anguish He experienced nor denied it. And instead of hiding His deepest pain, Jesus spoke honestly of it. (And I’m learning the same should be true for those of us who call ourselves Christians and whose mission it is to emulate Him in all we do. Even…in how we grieve.) 

So the question becomes, will we be brave enough to tell of our sorrow? Will we stop hiding our humanness away, and choose instead to be honest about it like Jesus? And in my case, will I stop striving so hard to conceal my mess, and instead choose to write through it? (God is up there in Heaven hoping I will.) 

That being said, I still can’t promise I will have anything nice to say, but I do have a lot that is jarringly honest to say. I sure as hell can’t tell of pretty things, but I can tell stories of painful things — about tragic miscarriages, decade-long infertility (with no end in sight and time quickly running out), and times when it felt like God dropped the ball and led me astray. I can speak about betrayals, a near plane crash, and a diagnosis that threatened to leave me deaf and blind. And more than that, how it all changed me. 

I can’t promise I have answers to all my faith questions (far from it if I’m honest) but what I can promise is I’ll never walk away from my faith despite them.

All I know for sure is it’s okay to feel your rawest emotions, it’s even okay to speak of them… gasp. Unlike generations before us have made us believe.

(After all, Jesus did.)

Next Post: Rock Climbing the River Floor (You Will Recover Your Life)