Scars That Mend Make Us Better
June 23, 2020
The human body is quite resilient, literally a walking community of working parts and organs specifically designed to bring life into our being. I take it for granted most days. I wake up and begin my routine of prayer and coffee, read the news and review my schedule of what I hope to accomplish in the day.
Occasionally, I stop to notice the scar on the palm of my right hand where I sliced it open at age 5 when I fell on a toy train. This is back in the day when toys were made out of metal, not plastic. I was wrestling with my brothers and fell on the train slicing a clean horizontal cut across the lower part of my palm. The experience was traumatic because it was the first significant injury to my body.
My father took me to the ER where they sutured my hand without local anesthetic. As my father tells the story, I had a head cold and being a young child they didn’t want the drugs to exacerbate my cold symptoms or so it goes. As I laid on the ER bed, the nurse held my hand flat on the table while the doctor closed up the wound. What they didn’t account for is the fear and mental anguish created by the pain of my flesh being stitched together and the helplessness of being held down. I vividly remember staring up and screaming, blinded by spot lights and silhouetted adult shapes hovering over me.
The hand healed and since then I have experienced numerous other injuries that have required a doctor’s care. Head injuries, concussions, broken bones, hernia repair, fractured teeth, torn tendons, not to mention flu viruses, bacterial infections…I am embarrassed to say the list continues because I never stopped clumsily tripping forward through life. The point being, I am still here by God’s mercy, and my body is engineered to repair itself. A walking community with integrated triage and healing forces that mend.
However, the scars remain as reminders of life experiences and points in time where my body was wounded. The wounds caused by traumatic events where I was forced to stop and change my routine to heal. Many are life’s lessons that formed my character. Metaphorically speaking, our country is knitted together to cohabitate and build community working in harmony to create livelihoods. Each of us shaped by our stories and our scars, we can relate to each other by our wounds and where we share joy.
The pandemic has put our country on hold and our broken routines have created time for observation and reflection. Mass media is a curse and a blessing, and the images we watch stir our humanness to respond in good and bad ways. Sociologists will eventually theorize why it took George Floyd’s agonizing death to be the inflection point and not others before him; yet it is his death that has ripped open our country’s scars of prejudice.
It’s as if a callousness caused by an overload of mass media images hardened our hearts until this image of heinous contempt of life tore the scar tissue away. We are forced to tend a gushing wound that cannot be ignored. Like the scene of an accident, each of us responds in our own way: some run to, others run from, while still others watch. This is a transformative moment and a call to action that we all can be better.
When the body is wounded and heals it gets better. When we humble ourselves to care for others, we’re better. When we selflessly put others in front of ourselves, they’re better. When a country shares a common value of goodness, we’re all better for it. When we own our stories and our scars, it creates awareness of our commonalities. It opens our hearts to compassion, and we can use our gifts for the common good like a surgeon’s hand to clean and stitch our community back together. Scars often heal stronger after the mend, creating a tattoo of what life was like and how we got better. This is my prayer.