Kidney Stones

The older man sitting across from me shrugged.  "I guess it passed some time on Sunday," he said.  "I've had them before, but I can't say I ever look forward to the experience."

I glanced down at the papers I had printed off.  "Looks like it was a 4 mm kidney stone," I said.  "Pretty amazing that something that small could cause so much pain."

"I hope it's awhile before I have to go through that again,"  he said.

Kidney stone pain is one of the more uncomfortable things a person can experience.  As I thought about it, I wondered what the difference was between labor pain and kidney stone pain.  Is one more intense than the other?

I have experienced neither one of these glorious things personally, although I've helped plenty of mothers in labor and seen other folks who felt like they were passing a bowling ball through their ureters.  Google wasn't my friend either and didn't seem to have any conclusive answer as to which pain is worse.

Peppers have a Scoville Scale to rate their spiciness, but the closest thing we have to a pain scale is the one where nurses ask you to rate your pain on a scale of one to ten.  Not very useful when a lot of folks out there wish that this scale went to eleven.

Clearly the biggest difference between kidney stone pain and labor pain is in the end result.  No one ever keeps their kidney stones, names them, or is happy at their passing -- except that it results in relief of pain.  On the other hand, labor ends in a crying baby and announcements far and wide about the new life that has entered the world.

It seems to me that this is a perfect metaphor for the differences in how a nihilist and a Christian experience pain in their lives.  The nihilist believes that suffering has no purpose.  It is to be avoided at all cost and demonstrates only that the Universe is a cold, unfeeling place.

On the other hand, the Bible tells us that "...we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us." (Romans 5:3-5)

Everyone will experience pain at some point.  The question is whether suffering proves to us that there is a heartless Universe or a Loving God behind the things we experience.

For me, it is clear that there is a Master plan at work in my life, even when I don't know all of the details of it.  God loves me and that's enough to see me through whatever pain I may face -- even kidney stones.