William Guthrie is a practicing family and addiction medicine physician who is happily married to his wife, Natalie. His greatest joy is sharing the unconditional freeness of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

<p>William Guthrie is a practicing family and addiction medicine physician who is happily married to his wife, Natalie. His greatest joy is sharing the unconditional freeness of the gospel of Jesus Christ.</p>

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

Advent HOPE Sabbath School

William Guthrie

The Antidote to Pain

Let's start with prayer this morning as we seek the Lord together.

Father in heaven, we thank you so much for your goodness and your love toward us.

In a world that is full of uncertainty, full of pain, We just look to you and we ask that you would be here this morning as we ponder your goodness and your love and pray that you would send your Holy Spirit to be with us, in Jesus' name, amen.

Okay, so in line with the theme, I don't know how this all came together this way, but I didn't even select the picture with this story in mind, but a few years ago I was skiing with some friends.

And we were up in the Lake Tahoe area, and we'd driven several extra hours to get to this particular ski area because of the terrain there.

It had steep terrain, and I like steep terrain on skis.

As we pulled into the parking lot, There was still a bit of weather hovering over the mountain, clouds and things like that.

We jumped out of the car, got into our skis.

And we headed straight to the top of the mountain on the lift.

And I think it was about the second run in, though, that I identified a cliff.

And some of you would say, well, you're crazy.

You know, nobody should be skiing around cliffs.

But I thought, and I sometimes think that, you know, Cliffs are fun to ski off of.

So this cliff looked like it had a good landing, and I was eager to take advantage of this challenging terrain that we'd come to this resort for.

The snow conditions were great, And so I sent my friends ahead.

They went down to the bottom of the cliff and scouted out the landing.

And I stood at the top and mentally prepared.

Has anybody stood on top of a high dive, like 1 of the really high dives, you know?

The longer you ponder it, the worse it gets, right?

But eventually, they gave me the all clear.

And I proceeded to ski directly off the cliff and straight into, remember that weather I was talking about?

And what happened was, the landing came up very abruptly, as you might imagine, because my frame of reference, have you ever tried to ski in a cloud, or walk in a cloud?

You get nauseated because your body has, it's like riding on a roller coaster, and your body has no frame of reference.

As I contacted the snow, I immediately felt my body get thrown forward.

My boots ejected from the bindings on my skis.

As I continued to hurtle forward, I met the front end of 1 of my skis coming up the other way.

The rigid material of the ski proved to be unforgiving to the tissue of my upper lip.

It happened way too fast, I couldn't even think about it.

The shock hadn't worn off before I discovered quite a bit of blood pouring out of my upper lip.

My friends graciously slid slowly beside me as I gingerly made my way down the ski slope, leaving a trail of red snow all the way down the mountain, intervently stopping to exchange a red snowball for a white 1.

At least there was a virtually unlimited supply of what we could refer to as nature's gauze.

So we proceeded down, entered and asked them, where's the urgent care here?

Most ski areas of size have a little, you know, casualty area where you can get some help.

And I met a really nice ER physician there.

She was staffing the place, and she offered to stitch up the damage my ski had done, although she did admit she wasn't a plastic surgeon.

I tried not to pay too much attention to that, and agreed that it was probably the best thing to do to go ahead with getting things taken care of.

But what I wasn't prepared for, I see Dr.

Moret over here, he's glued in on this, was the anesthetic going into my upper lip.

And many of you will know that the lip and nose area is highly innervated.

And as an aside, I've never been afraid, I've never been a fan of vaccines at all, or needles in general.

And when I was a kid, I think the pediatrician's office, or the pediatricians must have, at least the staff at the pediatrician's office, must have known me as a Houdini or something like that.

I remember on 1 occasion, after I'd escape the exam room, they had to pursue me down the hall and catch me and drag me back, only to hold me down and treat me like a human pincushion for a little bit.

But back in the Kirkwood urgent care, those nerves were doing an exceptional job of transmitting the sensation of what felt like 1000 bees descending on my upper lip.

I forgot all about getting poked with a needle, and despite my valiant effort, there was no holding them back.

The tears just flowed freely, adding saline liquid to the mixture of lidocaine and blood.

But if I lost you in the details, the pain was excruciating, but thankfully, short-lived.

The doctor did what turned out to be an excellent job of repairing the lacerations.

With the day cut short due to the injury and subsequent repair, we returned home.

Looking back, the worst part in retrospect was all the missed skiing that we had.

In medicine, we have an entire subspecialty dedicated to treating pain.

Not to mention all the other specialties that treat various painful conditions.

We have medications, procedures, surgeries, and even psychotherapy for treating pain.

Usually It's easier if we know it will end.

But prolonged pain can be even harder to deal with.

If you know anyone or have experienced chronic pain, I've had my own little bout with chronic pain due to my excessive pickleball engagement.

Over the past few years, I developed an overuse injury with nagging pain in my neck that would worsen every time I played pickleball.

If you haven't seen me on the court, that's probably why.

It probably wasn't helped by my penchant for trying to smash the ball as hard as I could, though.

Pain isn't something most of us want to experience.

But pain is not also without any purpose, right?

We pull back from hot items to avoid being burned.

We stop activities or behaviors, like pickleball in my case, when they cause pain, because we inherently know that they may be causing us harm.

And so far, we've only been talking about physical pain, but what about other types of pain?

If you've ever experienced the end of a relationship, you may know the pain of rejection, a broken heart.

That pain can also be quite physical, right?

Others may have experienced the pain of losing a loved 1.

Or maybe more applicable in the academic setting is the pain of failure.

I wound up failing a few tests in medical school and when I lived at the house just down here on campus street, I remember trying to prepare for the part 1 of the boards and I just seemed like all of my classmates had made it to the top of Mount Everest and were putting their country's flag up there while I was trying to figure out how to use crampons and an ice axe at base camp.

It just didn't seem like it would be possible, but God is good and he got me through that.

I wound up failing a few tests at medical school though and having to retake the last of my licensing exams during my residency after failing on my first attempt.

But I'm grateful that failure does not define us.

I know there's others here who can attest to that.

My current job is in the field of addiction medicine.

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The Antidote to Pain

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