Healing Invisible Wounds

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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.  

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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.