Our pain is not a life-long camping site

'Everybody hurts sometime,' the famous group REM sang. But if this 'sometime' becomes 'all the time,' it is a clear indication of an unhealthy life. None of us has any excuse for wallowing in our problems all the time. It is deadly to promote our weaknesses or shortcomings to the level of virtues. Even though we all struggle with our brokenness in our own way, it should never become a permanent campsite. We should continually strive towards wholeness and repair before the Lord. If we do not, we risk becoming egocentric in our brokenness. We then hold those around us captive with our pain, and we manipulate them to pity us. Or we threaten them if they do not seem to care enough. The solution is to bring all our doubts and hurt to Jesus every time. We must also learn to leave them with Him! Only then will we be able to stand in service through our broken selves in the correct way. Then we can comfort others with the same comfort that God bestows on us, as Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 1.