I’ve always wondered why God made the human body able to experience severe, chronic pain. That level of pain seems to have no biological purpose. Pain as such has purpose as it signals the fight or flight response telling the person to protect that body part from injury. It protects the body in that you avoid harm in the first place knowing the consequence will be pain.
But extreme chronic pain seems to be a biological defect. Harm has already been done, healing reached its maximum potential. So I don’t see the point of when it goes on for decades and is crippling, except in its spiritual purpose. That alone points to the supernatural aspect of life, a higher dimension than nature.
Biologically it makes better sense for pain to subside and be manageable at its worst when it is chronic, or come to an end, so the person can function, but the worst kinds of pain (tuberculosis of the bone is one of the worst, for example) still are common enough throughout society and history to indicate there must be a higher purpose in it.
When pain takes over you, it strips you of living the kind of life in which pain has not overtaken you. Everything then revolves around the pain. And that is not uncommon.
I think most people are not acutely aware of this, that there is a minority of people living in major, chronic pain, because most people aren’t living in that state themselves, and the sufferer is either silent about an invisible condition, or at least somewhat removed from mainstream society because of their condition for most to take notice of everyday. You can often pick them out though because they move slow, are quiet, and have a stoic look on their face, struggling through it.
Pain is the cross for the person living with chronic pain. It is integral to their own salvation. It does have purpose beyond the biological. On one hand, relative to this life it is a kind of loss; on the other hand, relative to heaven it is a blessing. It is better to suffer the pain of a crippled leper for 100 years than the pains of purgatory, let alone hell.
Pain is paradoxical. It deprives you to some degree of life or vitality, but it drives you necessarily deeper into the marrow of life seeking other sources of life to sustain you, found in higher and deeper things. In other words, to mentally survive living with pain, that reality practically drives you closer to God, or at least it drives you to seek God more closely.
Maybe you live with major, chronic pain. Back pain, arthritis, neuropathy, migraines, or from conditions like multiple sclerosis or fibromyalgia. My wife herself from about 13 through 30 had rheumatoid arthritis that perhaps miraculously came to an end, but in those 17 years she often had extreme pain that made for setbacks in her schooling, work, and vocation in life.
She is much stronger than me by far. She said those years of pain were hard but she never felt any despair or doubt in God, or spiritual turmoil. Her solution was near constant prayer through it.
Chronic pain is one of the hardest aspects of this life. Most will eventually know what it is like. It is a mystery. But one day if we are saved there will be no more pain, and all the things we yearn for that are deprived us by pain will be given to us in heaven.