The Courage to Talk About Pain

In an emotion-phobic culture, most of us don’t know how to listen very well to emotional pain for the simple reason that we have never been taught that doing so is a good thing, or how to do it.

Miriam Greenspan, Healing Through the Dark Emotions

Writing a newsletter is difficult—not because of the writing, but because of the infinite odds of making a difference through what one writes. And be sure of this: I am writing The Spiritual Frontier to make a difference.

For decades, I have believed that politics, economics, and religion are the three most powerful forces in the world. Since the late ‘90s, I have included technology. These are my “four horsemen,” entities capable of changing the world as we know it. While the term often refers to the biblical harbingers of the apocalypse, it can also refer to catalysts of transformation. Whether my four horsemen of politics, economics, religion, and technology are of the apocalyptic variety or the enlightening kind depends almost entirely on our spirituality. Without spirituality, these four can and will cause immense pain. With spirituality, they can cause immense change for good. 

My hope in writing The Spiritual Frontier is to find even a few people (or, if I am lucky, a whole generation) who believe it is the spiritual understanding and implementation of these world forces that can make them a gateway to hope rather than despair. 

The spirituality of which I speak is the spirituality of Jesus. Through every article, podcast, and piece of content we create, we will make God audible through this spirituality. We may not always directly quote Scripture, but the spirituality of Jesus will be woven into everything we do. I believe this is how we channel those four horsemen into good, how we conquer the world, how we talk about and heal the pain that these forces can cause:

So the one who conquers the world is the person who believes that Jesus is the Son of God.

1 John 5:5 NCV

Before I was seven years old, I experienced the type of pain this world can deliver. I can still remember my mom being on the phone learning of her brother’s death. It was a race-related death in the South. 

Racism in the sixties, seventies, and eighties improved incrementally in the US, but those four horsemen remained more apocalyptic than enlightening. My uncle was just one of their victims. From this moment on, it became apparent to me that humanity possessed no durable answer for the despair we each face. 

Much has improved in the 21st century, but despair remains a sociological sickness for which we have too few answers. This is the lostness Jesus saw and wants us to see.

Jesus went through many towns and villages. He taught in their synagogues. He preached the good news of the kingdom of God. He healed every disease and sickness. [36] Whenever crowds came to Him, He had compassion for them because they were so deeply distraught, malaised, and heart-broken. They seemed to Him like lost sheep without a shepherd.

Matthew 9:35-36 VOICE

This sickness of despair predates us all, but the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 was a turning point that sharply exacerbated it. Since then, I have seen far too many people defeated by their pain. I have been tempted myself. I would never equate my ordinary struggle, or anyone’s, with the tragedy of those lost to what researchers call “deaths of despair” — suicide, overdose, and alcohol. By 2021, those deaths had climbed to nearly two hundred thousand a year in the United States. There is hope in the latest numbers — 2024 brought the first significant decline since 1999. But those numbers are considered fragile and count only the dead. They have never counted the millions still alive, whose hope is quietly stolen, day after day, by the sheer fatigue of living.

What makes living so hard? While politics, economics, religion, and technology are powerful, they cannot replace the spiritual forces our souls desperately need:

And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.

1 Corinthians 13:13 NIV

Despair is born out of exchanging faith for religion, hope for economics and technology, and loving relationships for politics. These three things—faith, hope, and love—are the spirituality of God and Jesus. These spiritual forces prevent us from drowning in the sea of despair created by humanity’s self-reliance. They have the power to conquer the worldly forces of the “four horsemen” so that they serve rather than enslave humanity.

As a shattering of my bones, my adversaries reproach me, While they say to me all day long, “Where is your God?” [11] Why are you in despair, O my soul? And why are you disturbed within me? Wait for God, for I shall still praise Him, The salvation of my presence and my God.

Psalm 42:10-11 LSB

Let’s revisit Miriam Greenspan’s insights from the beginning of this newsletter:

In an emotion-phobic culture, most of us don’t know how to listen very well to emotional pain for the simple reason that we have never been taught that doing so is a good thing, or how to do it.

Miriam Greenspan, Healing Through the Dark Emotions

Can you listen well to emotional pain, in yourself or others? Do you believe that doing so is a good thing? Jesus had the courage to see and listen to pain, and in doing so, he healed and transformed it. 

Some might think I am a utopian, that I believe this world can be rid of pain. I do not think the world can be rid of pain, but I do believe God has given us the power to conquer it, so that all the amazing innovations we discover can be for the flourishing rather than despair of the human race. Living this way will require courage—the courage to talk about our pain.