Guest Post from Dennis Ortman: Pain Patience
From Dennis Ortman PAIN PATIENCE “We rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces character, and character produces hope, and hope will not leave us disappointed.” Romans 5: 3-4 What is more natural than to seek pleasure and avoid pain? We Americans entertain high ideals. We aspire to greatness, to being the best, number one. These aspirations, however, may at times shade into excess. Our remarkable advances in technology promise to fulfill our dreams. So we seek lives of the most pleasure with the least pain. The pharmaceutical industry invests billions of dollars to help us attain this goal. Their medications promise wellbeing and the possibility of killing all pain. This mentality and the easy availability of drugs spawned the opioid epidemic. We sought a better life, a pain-free life, through chemistry. Soon, the dream of wellbeing turned into a nightmare. The more pills we consumed to escape the pain, the more we needed to take, until we reached a limit. The p