Scars of healing

Though the rash and the scabs have healed over from my bout of shingles I had only a few weeks ago, there are small flower-shaped scars, like hydrangeas, in their place. When my shingles were at their worst, even wearing a simple cotton T-shirt hurt because it rubbed against my raw, tender rash. Fabric became like lemon juice on a paper cut, or rubbing your eye after cutting up a jalapeno. Something so simple and harmless, like a cotton T-shirt, rubbed wrongly at my most tender and achy parts. 

For a class, I have to read a bunch of books by modern Christian authors. It's a class on non-fiction Christian narratives, and I can say now halfway through the semester, that I have never had a class touch me so deeply in my four years here at this University. 

Have you ever had a book  or a story touch you in your innermost part? The spot inside you that is tender and raw, that is only half-healed but not quite there yet. Reading Traveling Mercies by Anne Lamott was like re-opening those hydrangea-shaped scars on my side. 

I couldn't relate to her life even remotely. She had grown up in a home that hated Christianity, she was an alcoholic, she did drugs, she had had an abortion and almost got another one until deep despair took over her and she had her son, Sam, instead - her treasured, kindhearted, son who she almost threw away. But it wasn't that suddenly a bolt of lightning from the heavens struck her or that she had this huge "God moment" and BAM her life did a 180, but rather that her story was raw, real, and spoke of true human struggles, even after you become a Christian. 

I sat in on a group once that was sharing their testimonies, as if sharing all the bad things in their lives would suddenly turn people over to Jesus.

“My father left my mother when I was a child. I never knew him, and I don’t have the desire to know him,” one guy shared with head hung in dramatic reverence to his story. “I grew up in a broken home, my mom had to take care of five children on her own, and I so eagerly gave up on God that I was left with a distaste for anyone who labeled themselves ‘Christians’.”

That man shared his story as if getting to Jesus, or understanding Jesus, was easy. It was chronological and it was what I like to call a “lost and found” story: First I was lost, and then I was found. First I was broken, and then I was healed. First I was bad, and then I was good. But I struggled to fit in the in between bits; to me, a person didn't just suddenly change who they were entirely. You can’t just go from broken to fixed with the snap of a finger. I think things like healing take a lot of time and pain and a lot of other messy junk that nobody wants to talk about. Even after you’re glued back together, you can still see the cracks from the once broken places. Even after you've healed from a wound, or shingles, or surgery, the scars are still there to remind us. 

Jesus was radical in his days wasn't he? I mean he talked to women prostitutes and hung out with the drunkards and the money-hungry tax collectors who cheated and swindled innocent people out of their hard earned money. He touched lepers and diseased people and blind, poor, crippled, people. Jesus hung out with the losers, the scum of the earth, the people who nobody ever in their right minds wanted to be associated with. So tell me, why do we as the body of Christ, as Christians, act so high and mighty all the time and think way too often that we are better than others? We look down on the gays, on the people with HIV and AIDS and STD's, the woman who had a baby out of wedlock, the prostitutes, the alcoholics, the druggies, the abandoned, instead of actually for ONCE doing what Christ himself commanded of us - to show those people LOVE and to treat them with at least their smallest, most basic right: to look them in the eyes and see them as a human being with struggles and problems and sins just like you and I. 

I'm not telling you as a Christian to go out and start accepting everything now, but I firmly believe that God created and loves each and every one of us. He loves you just as much as he loves that homosexual. He loves you just as much as he loves that 16-year-old pregnant girl. He loves you just as much as he loves that divorced woman struggling with feelings of betrayal. So what makes you so special? Are you suddenly special because you slapped a Jesus fish on your bumper and you wear W.W.J.D around your wrist? Don't become like the Pharisees who focused on the things that make us look good, and the things that separate us from other human beings, (Matthew 23:23-24). And never forget, that we are all sinners. We all make mistakes. We all have problems and short-comings. And we all need the love of Christ. A person, no matter the size of their sin or struggle, no matter who they are or where they've been, still has the chance to enter the kingdom of God. 

Maybe they just need some healing to take place. Maybe someone just needs somebody, anybody, to reach out to them for once and just listen without passing judgment. Or for someone to see their scars as something real, instead of passing over or ignoring them. Because scars may be signs of hurt, pain, or struggle - but scars are also signs of healing.