There is a knitting term called tinking, which is to un-knit your knitted work. It is to unravel your work in order to correct a mistake. When I use a complicated pattern or when I use no pattern and knit on the fly, I tend to tink all the time because I knit while watching a TV show, which means I don’t always pay attention.
Tinking is a pain, but necessary if I want my project to turn out right.
In the midst of it, pain doesn’t bring freedom. It brings pain. It brings confusion and doubts. Hindsight is twenty-twenty. We see our past clearly because we can find the lessons we learned. We can see the story arc. We understand that we had to go through painful moments to reach the wonderful place.
In the midst of it though, pain sucks.
In the midst of pain, I don’t ask God for more. I ask Him for freedom from the pain. But going through the pain will bring freedom. Nothing worth anything is easily achieved.
If you want a pretty diamond, you’ve gotta mine for it. Or work really hard to earn the money to buy it. But even diamonds aren’t pretty right away. Rough diamonds can look like ordinary crystals. They have to go through the cutting process to look like the diamonds we see in stores.
This is not to say that we should discount somebody’s pain, or our own pain, because there’s light at the end of the tunnel. It’s important to recognize pain and go through the healing process. We need to go through the tunnel, remembering that there is light at the end of it. There is hope and there is freedom.
There are seasons in our lives where everything seems to be unraveling. We are being tinked. We are being corrected. It will only be for a moment. After the tinking, we can move forward and grow.
There is freedom in pain, but it doesn’t look like freedom. It doesn’t feel like freedom. It doesn’t act like freedom. That’s because the negative stuff in our lives are often more powerful that the good stuff. Social psychology research found that it takes five positive experiences to undo the consequences of one negative experience.
In the midst of pain, there is still hope around us. There is still help and healing. There is light and freedom. They are just very hard to notice. They are hard to hold onto. But it’s so important that we do.
If you’re going through some kind of pain, hold on to the good stuff in life. Pain is temporary and you will be alright.
