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The Sunday Read: ‘Chronic Pain Is a Hidden Epidemic. It’s Time for a Revolution.’
Sun, 2 Feb 2025
Here’s a strange story: One day two summers ago, Jennifer Kahn woke up because her arms — both of them — hurt. Not the way they do when you’ve slept in a funny position, but as if the tendons in her forearms and hands were moving through mud. What felt like sharp electric shocks kept sparking in her fingers and sometimes up the inside of her biceps and across her chest. Holding anything was excruciating: a cup, a toothbrush, her phone. Even doing nothing was miserable. It hurt when she sat with her hands in her lap, when she stood, when she lay flat on the bed or on her side. The slightest pressure — a bedsheet, a watch band, a bra strap — was intolerable.Our understanding of pain, and especially chronic pain, is far behind where it should be. We don’t know what causes a person with an injury to develop chronic pain, or why it happens in some people and not others, or why it happens more often in women. At a genetic and cellular level, we don’t know which systems get out of whack, or why, or how to fix them. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Full Episode
Hey Bible Readers, I'm Tara Lee Cobble and I'm your host for the Bible Recap. Yesterday, we saw the first seven plagues God brought on the Egyptians because Pharaoh wouldn't listen to Moses and set the Israelite slaves free. Today, we dropped in on the rest of the plagues.
The first few sentences we read today said, I have hardened his heart and the heart of his servants, that I may show these signs of mine among them, that you may know that I am the Lord. This whole paragraph was a weighty paragraph. It almost sounds like part of God's plan was to harden Pharaoh's heart against his plan.
And the reason was that this process would help Israel really know and trust him as God. He uses the wicked as a tool to advance his plan and bless the children he's adopted into his family. We can't cut sentences like this out of the Bible. We have to wrestle with them and see what they mean and how they fit into the context of everything else in Scripture.
I'm not going to tie it up with a pretty bow and make it look simple. It's hard, it's mysterious, and it's okay to not have answers about it yet, or maybe ever. In yesterday's reading, we encountered several places where God hardened Pharaoh's heart, a few where it just says his heart was hardened, and a few that attribute the hardening to Pharaoh himself.
But interestingly, Pharaoh's hardening of his own heart is almost always followed with the statement, "'As the Lord had said.'" It can feel threatening to recognize that God is bigger than your own heart, that he can shape it for his own purposes. If that's you and you're feeling that way right now, I would encourage you to not let fear drive that thought.
The enemy of your soul wants you to view God's power through a lens that pushes you away from him instead of drawing you in. So instead, try to stop and acknowledge how comforting it is that we serve a God who is that powerful. For instance, think about the people that you know and love who are the furthest from God. People you've prayed for and cried for.
People who have told you that they never want to hear you say another word about God again. God can soften their hearts and turn them on their heels, just like He did with the Apostle Paul, who, by the way, wasn't just not seeking God. He was actively at war against God and His people, much like Pharaoh.
For God to be sovereign over sins and hearts means no one is beyond His reach, and it's never too late for anyone. And that is the greatest comfort I can imagine. Moving on, today we see the frustration mounting with Pharaoh's servants and Pharaoh starts to weaken his resolve. But instead of obeying, he asked for a compromise. God doesn't really go for that.
So the locusts and the darkness come, but still no repentance. Then God sends what he knows will be the final plague. Moses has all the Israelites ask the Egyptians for their valuables, and they hand them over.
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