What If...

The pastor's words hit me with a special kind of force as syllables come from the lips of one who has sat with God and he's telling us all about the doubts of Thomas and what it means to be blessed when you don't see yet believe.  He talks about the patience of Jesus as He showed his skeptical disciple his scars and taught him a lesson in faith. 

But then, he points out something profound: even after Jesus had risen from the dead, the wounds still remained. After all, he did tell Thomas to put his finger into His side and to touch the holes in His hands. The pastor notes one would naturally think that, after having been resurrected, His earthly body would've been wound-free...but it wasn't. The wounds were still there as proof that He had survived. That He had overcome. That those who crucified Him didn't have the last word. That Love won. That He really and truly was alive. 

And suddenly, a question comes to my mind, and I sit on it the rest of the day... 

What if the wounds remain?

Sometimes, I think we all believe that healing looks like getting as wound-free as possible. After all, there are surgeons specifically designed to do procedures that beautify scars so that a person can feel as closely back to normal as they once were. We don't like to have scars. Because they symbolize to us where something went wrong. Be they internal or external, we know we didn't come into the world with them and there's a part of us that doesn't want to accept their presence. And so we look for ways to eliminate them or at least fade them to some degree. 

And I often wonder if we don't look at spiritual renewal much the same way - we expect it's going to be this process of blotting out our memories and our hearts from past hurts, past sins, and past failures until one day, we feel as though it has faded from our mind and soul and we no longer see it. But really... if God designed the memory to retain everything on some level, is it logical to assume that we won't remember the things that pained us the most or the times we blew it? Can a scar truly be wiped away? 

Perhaps Jesus, when He showed His resurrected self to His followers, tried to show us a new way of looking at the wounds we carry. Instead of proving that, post-resurrection, He was "good as new," what if He was trying to get us to see that we can still be raised to new life and fresh beginnings and yet carry the marks of where we've been? 

What if healing is about learning to say as He did, "Come, touch my wounds and see my story and believe that there is a God..." 

What if our journey to healing is incomplete unless we embrace the proof of our survival?

What if others can't see the Savior for who and what He really is unless they see His grace reflected in the imperfections we bear? 

What if the wound is actually where the Light gets in? 

Wounds, as aggravating as they are, may actually carry the real message of what the Gospel is all about: God allowing His own Son to be scarred because with those very wounds humanity is healed... the Divine being physically ripped apart so that eternal peace with the Father could become possible and available to all. 

There was no other way for salvation to find its way to all of us and, just maybe, there isn't another way for healing to find its way to us either. Because perhaps it all comes back to the simple truth that the wounded way is the healed way. That to be broken is to be ultimately made whole. That the things we most want to hide are actually the greatest testimony to the hand of God. 

Jesus stood in the midst of His shocked disciples and showed them His wounds as a sign that He had triumphed. Consider then that our way to witness, our way to mended-ness, is through the battle-marks we've acquired along the way. The things that show how we've fought and come through, how we've ached and hurt but still survived. 

It seems to me that asking ourselves what the wounds could tell, what the scars show is an unlikely yet honest place to arrive at. It is a place where God can meet us and identify with us and prove to us through His Son that there can be no rising without a dying, no overcoming without a test, and no healing without a hurt. 

Maybe it's time we stop trying to erase the past and bring it forward instead. Maybe it's time we quit attempting to wipe out the very thing that attests the most to the story God is writing in our lives. 

What if the wounds remain, friend? 

Is that really such a bad thing after all?