Life Tattoos

I have one on my forehead from when I tucked a back dive too deep and collided with a concrete ledge.  I have one tattooed on my knee from when I tried to slide to a halt on my bicycle on a graveled road.
Cat scratches. Chicken pox. Wart removal.
Now knife versus finger over a Easter breakfast ham...

I gots scars.
They each tell a unique -- sometimes comical, sometimes frightening --story.
And maybe it's because I'm a nurse, but I think scars are pretty awesome.

Our lives, our health in someway infringed upon, compromised, and then...recovery.

Cell by cell -- there is new growth, scientifically phrased, there is proliferation, angiogenesis.
New tissue, new blood vessels. Just as miraculously as our cells divide within the dark cover of our mother's womb as our person forms, so the broken grows, divides, heals.  The same Cell Conductor poetically whispers directions to little cells, little nuclei, leading them onward. And the cells obey. Where I had a gnarly, bloody gash, a squirting arteriole, there is now new formed skin, a sealed barrier once more, functional protection for my little finger, with a red scarred memory stamped  upon the miracle.

Life leaves us scarred, inevitably tattooed.
No one passes through the human blip of experience without injury --physical, or otherwise.

Sometimes things go sour and infection pushes itself through the entry way, uninvited. Sometimes the ugly grows, oozes. Sometimes the scarring becomes increasingly twisted. I do not pretend to assume that all breakdown and pain is made better. The dark monsters that can haunt the physical body are many, and they can be viscous, unrelenting predators. We live on this little planet in chasms of upheaval and disaster. And sometimes, oftentimes, to witness the breakdown of the human shell, the torment of the mind, is itself a scarring process. I know. Sometimes watching the news after a week like this one, does it too.

Jesus had scars too. Thomas wanted to touch them -- those lingering reminders of hellish torment.

The Man known as the One Who could, who can Heal.
Confused crowds pressed in around Him, hoping to just brush up against His garments.
Pains relieved. Seizures no more. Paralyzed limbs -- up and dancing. Skin clean of sores. Blind eyes open. And deaf ears too. The One Who takes dry bones and ashes, and paints beautiful life.
The One Who came to bind up the broken hearted, the One on a mission to reconcile and redeem the severed, the splintered, the aching, the pain.

This One, had scars too.

But he was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed. -Isaiah 53:5