Divine Pain: A Book about What's Divinely Yours, Life Changing Perspectives and Finding Strength in Your Painful Experiences

By Leslie Whigham

Painful experiences are divinely yours.

The suffering we all experience has meaning. A reason for being. Each experience has a purpose but none are more important than the ones that cause misery.

Your pain has purpose.

In Divine Pain, author Leslie Whigham presents four ma

• Language: English
• Publisher: New Degree Press
• Release date: Feb 3, 2023
• ISBN: 9798889266181

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

In the middle of the night on July 9, 2005, my life turned upside down. It was the night my father suddenly passed away. I was only sixteen years old and my father only fifty-two. I had a friend staying the night with me. Around two o’clock in the morning, my stepmom came yelling my name down the stairs to my basement bedroom. Leslie! I need your help! Something is wrong with your dad!

I flew up both flights of stairs to their bedroom on the second level, and there he was on the floor, naked and foaming at the mouth. My stepmom had already called 911. She continued to try and do CPR, but I could only stand there in shock asking God, whom I didn’t have a real relationship with at the time, to do something.

I was living my worst nightmare.

Nothing has ever been the same, including me. My father’s death set me on a whole other journey that wouldn’t have existed if he had still been alive. Even with this incredible loss, something I feared for many years even as a young child, I knew I had to persevere. I knew I couldn’t let his death destroy my life. I knew he wouldn’t have wanted that, and I still wanted to make him proud.

The loss of a loved one is not the only hard shit that goes on in one’s life. Over the last seventeen years since my father’s passing, and truly even before my father passed, I have encountered many other difficult and painful experiences. As I’ve grown and gone through these challenges, I have taken an interest in humans and why we do what we do. What causes some to respond one way and others a different way even with the same experiences? Human beings’ responses and reactions to situations, especially the challenging ones, always had me wondering, Why?

Why do some kids turn to drugs just because their parents divorced? Why do others fall into severe depression or develop addictions after they have lost a loved one? On the flip side, why do some not do those things? These questions came to me after watching many episodes of the show Intervention. The show gives you the backstory for each person who is at the center of the intervention, and they share what went wrong in their life before they went down their path of addiction. Some had loving parents who simply divorced, and that was enough for them to spiral down their destructive path. Others had sexual abuse or neglect that triggered theirs. But when I think about their lives and mine, I think, My mother was an alcoholic and I had terrible traumas as a child with her, and my father died when I was sixteen. Should I be someone like that? Why was that not part of my journey?

There are so many answers to this question. Personally, I will say, I just didn’t have it in me to self-destruct that much. Not to say I didn’t have issues. I just had an inherent strength to keep going and trusted that my journey had more in store for me. I think that’s the biggest difference. People sometimes get such tunnel vision about life and think what they are receiving right now is all they will get and can’t find hope or opportunity in their future, which in turn makes them feel hopeless and turn toward drugs and alcohol to numb the inevitable path of doom they think is their life.

With my thirty-three years on this planet and my own experiences of loss and pain, I have gathered my own insight into why people do what they do. And that’s what inspired me to share my words with you. I want to help. I want to inspire, and I want to assist people in making more beneficial and powerful choices even when faced with adversity. I absolutely hate watching people victimize themselves just because of life’s difficult circumstances. I want to take away that tunnel vision for those who only see doom and give them hope and inspiration. Every human being struggles with adversity, some much more than others, and even people like myself can feel hopeless sometimes, but that’s normal. It just takes remembering there is more and to keep forging on with faith that there is a purpose to all of this, because if we believe otherwise, we truly will feel doomed.

With that said, this book is about seeing things from a different perspective. It’s about empowering you and showing you that you call the shots. It’s about finding faith and gratitude and the lessons and meanings behind these hard things we must go through, along with trusting there is a reason for it all. And more importantly, it’s about grieving, healing, and growing.

I believe our culture brushes off the importance of grieving all too often, when truly it’s the golden ticket to a happy and healthy life. In a culture that has been ran and mostly built by men, emotions have been swept under the rug too quickly for the sake of moving on. Showing emotion is a sign of weakness and is often frowned upon for men and women. Just get over it, they say. Crying won’t help solve your problem is another known saying that dismisses emotion. Not only does our society frown upon emotions because it makes everyone uncomfortable, but in our world of instant gratification we move forward all too quickly before we have even started or finished what was in front of us in the first place. How many times have people ended long-term relationships and the next day created a dating profile looking for the next instant thing? We are not giving ourselves enough time to sit with our shit.

The hard things we must go through in our lives don’t define us, but they do mold us.

Using these events to evolve as a better, more complex human being will, in response, make you a more intentional person. Learning to take the bad you are given and make it a strength can literally make you unstoppable and humble as fuck.

During the making of this book, I worked one full-time job, two part-time jobs, my mother passed away, and my boyfriend who I love dearly was deployed in the Middle East. We had met one month almost to the day before he was set to leave overseas. I could have chosen to not be exclusive with him during his deployment, as our relationship was so fresh, but there was something about him… And honestly, the situation made me laugh. I said to myself, Of course the man I would fall in love with would have to leave me right after we meet. But I can do hard things, so I’m going to say yes to this. And I did. He’s home now, and although it wasn’t easy, I’m so glad I decided to take on that hard thing. Do you think I had just a little on my plate?

Also, what are the odds that as I’m writing a book about doing hard things, another hard thing like losing my mother happens? To me, that is no coincidence. Pure serendipity. And I could have decided to throw in the towel and quit writing this book, or I could be easy with it and keep forging on. Spoiler alert: If you’re reading this, I forged on.

This is life. This is my life. Not one person is exempt from challenges, and definitely not just one at a time. Sometimes they all come at us at once, and we are put in a position to decide how we will respond. Do we run from our problems, or do we show up ready to take it on headfirst and own it? When I was going through my divorce last year, I adopted the saying, I can do hard things, as an affirmation to help push me through the difficult transition. Because I knew I’d survive another hard thing. I knew I had already survived a lot of hard things, and one of the hardest things was losing my father.

The death of my father was one of my catalysts to write this book, but being in it now and having just lost my mother, the catalysts shift a little. The stories with my mother are complex, and like the rest, they are very serendipitous. If you have lost a parent too soon or have mommy or daddy issues, then you’ll be able to relate, so please, read on.

For me, my journey has been what I would call unique, and in all my uniqueness I have messages to share. And I want to share them because I want to inspire you and help you heal. I feel an internal nudge or pull to do this, because I have been in your shoes before, and now I want to change your perspective on life. I want you to see the world from a place of joy, not suffering. All too many of us suffer and feel like there is no reason to