At dinner Friday night with some friends, I met a lady from their church. I remarked that I needed to find something on the Mexican restaurant’s menu that wouldn’t damage my wellness plan. I’ve been pre-diabetic for eight years now, but I’ve managed my condition with diet and exercise. I even have a Fitbit exercise monitor that links to my sparks people food record. “Gosh! That’s so much trouble” she said, “why do you worry with all that?” I looked at her and replied, “Because I have a family history of diabetes, I’m pre-diabetic, and my younger brother is insulin dependent and already had congestive heart failure. I don’t want to go there too.” “Been there, done that. It’s all part of life,” she said.
I have been on a healing journey for years. What, you say, are you just spiritually slow, recalcitrant, a backslider, sluggardly, or just too busy to take care of yourself? If our healing journeys are toward our recovery of our original image of divine creation, I’m not yet there, but I persist by the grace of God.
I don’t berate myself for not yet arriving, but the last few years I’ve had a hardness of my heart regarding others who have gone “so far, but no farther.” They have in effect become settlers and comfortable at some village located in a cozy hollow beside a pleasant stream. They have nice neighbors and maybe a few quaint nut cases to liven up the town gossip mills. I confess that as one who can hardly wait for the next adventure, the next project, or even the next day, I’m not big on being “settled.”
This is why I’ve had six careers in my working life: artist, real estate investor, art teacher, insurance sales, wife and mom, and ministry. Now that I’m in retirement, I’ve taken up writing and resurrected my artistic endeavors. I’m not settled enough to sit around, drink coffee and rehash my glory days or even talk about current events. I’m too involved in making current events!
This icon, “He Healed Others, Cannot He Heal Himself?” Is made of found objects which I picked up while walking around Mercy Hospital in Hot Springs, Arkansas. This 1.5 mile circuit from my local YMCA takes me from one healing place past many others: doctors’ offices, cancer treatment sites, home healthcare training schools, pharmacies, and clinics of every type. Across the street one can get food for the body. The busy roads and highways are a bountiful source for the castaway chunks of this human life.
As I picked up these assorted pieces of debris, I thought of the cast off people in this world: the hungry, the dying, the disabled, the terminally ill, the deaf, and the blind. The greatest healing sign was raising Lazarus from the dead! I had an old postcard from a trip to Italy I could use, along with some old embroidery hoops from the grandparent’s house that I’ll never use on a cloth, but I’ve “saved for the memories of their name.”
In the first three Gospels, the “chief priests also, along with the scribes and elders, were mocking him, saying, “He saved others; he cannot save himself. He is the King of Israel; let him come down from the cross now, and we will believe in him” (Matthew 27:41-42). To “save” is to heal, to preserve from harm, or to get well. We speak today of “being saved” as if it were a one and done, but in fact it is both an instantaneous and a long term process.
We want our wounds to be healed NOW! By golly, and don’t leave any visible scar as a sign of our past pain, but remove all signs of our imperfection from our hearts, minds, and souls. Just as the Son of a God took a human body to taste all of our peak and low experiences, even to the abandonment of death, I think God may have a purpose in leaving us with our scars as we continue on our journey.
The scars we bear are signs to others of the journey we’re still traveling, much like the stamps in our passports. They are the marks of our past pain and brokenness. If God were to wipe those identifying marks away, no one would know to seek us out as guides along their own journeys. God may be leaving these wounds open so that we can pour God’s love out through our brokenness into the lives of this hurting and hopeless world.
Our world is full of people that have been told that they need to get well before God will love them, but what they are really being told is “My wounds are covered over with a fake skin of perfection, so until you adopt your fake skin, find another place to worship.” Our open wounds that let God’s love flow through to all people, the wandering wounded and the settled saints both, is what will bring us closer to God as we come closer to our neighbor. Sometimes it’s easier to love a holy God than an unholy neighbor, but loving God’s creation should be a goal of our spiritual journey.
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