Designed To Heal Podcast: Your Body's Amazing Healing Power · Achieve Wellness

A Theology Of Pain (ft. Tim Ingle)

·39 min·2 clips

“God's not a vending machine,” Tim says after describing two weeks of agony and unanswered prayer.

1. Designed To Heal Podcast: Your Body's Amazing Healing Power centers on Tim Ingle and the theology of pain. 2. Dr. Ben Rall hosts Tim Ingle, an animator, illustrator, and Japanese Christian ministry worker with Second Level Ministry. 3. The episode asks what pain means when chronic suffering does not match a simple injury or diagnosis. 4. Tim says his pain began in fourth grade after a fall on the blacktop at school caused burning pain in his hands and lower arms. 5. He says his mother, an Army public health nurse, saw nothing wrong and called it growing pains. 6. By high school, Tim had constant back pain, pain in his hands and feet, and regular migraines. 7. He says he assumed everyone lived with the same pain until his wife said, “No,” when he mentioned that everything hurt all the time. 8. He visited doctors, rheumatologists, and neurologists, but they could not identify the root cause. 9. Tim says doctors told him he would “get worse and worse until you die,” which shaped his outlook until he met Dr. Ben Rall. 10. Ben told him, “don’t you know you’re designed to heal,” and Tim says that changed how he thought about recovery. 11. Tim describes reading C.S. Lewis's The Problem of Pain after prayer meetings and learning the idea that pain warns that something is wrong. 12. He says that explanation helped with injuries and emotional pain but did not explain chronic physical pain without an obvious cause. 13. A director at Second Level Ministry recommended Kazo Kitamori's The Theology of the Pain of God, which Tim read and kept texting about to his wife. 14. Tim points to Jeremiah 31:20 and says the phrase “heart yearns” reflects a deeper anguish than the English wording suggests. 15. He says the father sending the son is part of God's pain and love, and Jesus on the cross also experienced physical suffering. 16. Ben contrasts modern pain management, including opioids and gabapentin concerns, with a view of pain that can carry meaning instead of only needing elimination. 17. Tim says suffering can create camaraderie with Christ, reveal the wrath of God against sin, and turn pain into a testimony. 18. He compares the cross as a torture device to the cross as jewelry and church stationery, showing how Christians reframe a symbol of agony. 19. The tone is conversational and pastoral, with Ben pressing questions and Tim answering with scripture, personal history, and book references. 20. Listeners who want Christian reflections on chronic pain and suffering will likely connect with it, while anyone wanting a quick fix for pain management may skip it.

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