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She dug her hand into my left hip and I internally groaned
in both pain and relief. Her strong
fingers pushed and prodded into the lumpy, misshapen flesh, the remnants of a
partially healed scar.
Every couple of years, I’m reminded of the past when my hip
once again begins to ache. A massage
magically evaporates the pain and I can function again like nothing ever
happened. But every few years, it begins
again. The echo of past trauma that begs
me to feel the lumps and lines and hard creases deep within and to face my
scars.
The other wound is the one people see. The four inch bride of Frankenstein
monstrosity on my calf might as well be circled in blue highlighter with a “look
here” sign written in Sharpie. People
see that scar and they ask questions.
“What happened?”
“How did you get that?”
Or, my favorite thus far, “Did you die?”
The funny thing is that scar doesn’t hurt. There is no ache. It disappears into my daily life until I
happen to turn to see if my skirt is on straight. I look at my scar, it looks at me, we both
shrug and move on with our day. Yes, it
isn’t going away, but it’s healed.
My hip never garners attention or tells a story. It’s an invisible scar that no one can see,
but it likes to make sure I can’t forget it.
From day one, my calf screamed for attention from everybody else like a
town crier in the center of the city square.
My hip swallowed all my attention for a month. It relegated me to crutches, stole my
independence, and pulled tears out of my eyes like a freshly cut onion. The bruises went away but the wound has never
fully healed.
About nine years ago, a sweet grandmother received a new car
and driving lessons from her doting son.
On one warm afternoon, the son decided it was time for another
lesson. He patiently sat next to his
mother and instructed her how to navigate the bustling Kampala traffic. As they approached an intersection, traffic
stopped ahead. Unfortunately, the
grandmother did not. Grandmother
momentarily forgot which pedal was the brake and which was the gas. She guessed wrong and rear-ended a pickup
truck.
But first she rear-ended me.
Seeing the stopped cars, I had chosen that same moment to walk across
the street. With a crash and a bang and
a creaking of bending metal, I found myself getting acquainted with two
different bumpers simultaneously. Her
car met my left hip and smashed the back of my leg against the truck. The truck’s license plate met my calf,
slicing me in what I suspect was revenge for the rather impressive Tara-shaped
dent on the truck’s back bumper.
I decided I’d seen both cars quite enough and tried to walk
away, only to find I couldn’t walk and collapsed onto the dusty road. The grandmother and her son carried me to
their car and took me to the nearest hospital.
I spent the rest of the day telling the doctors they were
checking the wrong injury. They kept
looking at the blood. Their attention
was called by what they perceived was the greatest injury. I fought to draw their attention to what I
perceived was my greatest injury. They poked and prodded and pulled as I
shouted, “That’s not where it hurts. It
hurts here!”
My calf got stitches and antibiotics. My hip got an x-ray and a pronouncement of “soft
tissue damage” and was never treated or looked at again.
Wounds heal. My calf
scarred over, had its stitches removed, and slowly turned a mellow pink instead
of an angry red. My hip turned a rather fantastic
palette of rainbow colors before the bruises melted away into an invisible,
lumpy plain.
I appreciated my masseuse last week. She never asked about my calf. I told her my hip hurt and so she went
straight for where it hurt. She didn’t
avoid it, pretend it didn’t exist, or tell me it shouldn’t hurt. She didn’t tell me my other wound needed her
more. She didn't even speak. She listened. Then she helped me where I needed
it most. When I left, my hip no longer
hurt.
Jesus is a lot like my masseuse. He’s not afraid to deal with me where I hurt
most. He will go straight to my deepest,
most sensitive wounds and insist on bringing healing there. Sometimes He deals with stitching up
currently bleeding wounds and sometimes He waits until I have enough strength and
scar tissue to face reopening and revisiting old wounds.
He’s been doing the same thing to my heart lately. He whispers I need to forgive an old friend
and then that friend just happens to come into town. He nods His head in the direction of a past
humiliation and as I face it, He brings someone to rub joy all over it instead. He shouts about an old sorrow I need to
grieve and then sends me a whole army of friends with tissue boxes.
(Photo credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/span112/3126723470)
He refuses to let me sulk and stew and stay content as a
poorly patched up Frankenstein of a soul.
He insists on regeneration and new life and will not rest until I have
my limbs reattached properly. I work so
hard to bury old hurts in the past so I can function in the present. But Jesus won’t settle with partial
healing. He drags open the dusty, taped
up boxes and empties out the forgotten cupboards in my heart. As He carefully excavates, He throws out all
the dirt and dust bunnies and trash to unearth the treasures that are worth
finding and worth remembering. Those
treasures would otherwise have remained hidden underneath the muck and mire,
the humiliations and failures that I’d rather not revisit, but He wants me to
find them.
Wounds, even invisible ones, can still ache until they are
dealt with. Just because I can’t see it,
doesn’t mean I can’t feel it or that it doesn’t affect me. Time can start the healing process, but
sometimes I need a little help kneading out the lumps.
I’m glad that Jesus is a great masseuse.
