View from the Pacific Northwest III

Embracing our Scars

Apr 03, 2023

Embracing our Scars

“Every beauty is sleeping, it seems before it can meet its prince. The duckling must be ‘ugly,’ or there will be no story. The knight errant must be wounded, or he will never even know what the Holy Grail is, much less find it. Jesus must be crucified, or there can be no resurrection.” -Richard Rohr

I keep looking for quotes, poems, and other thoughts that will describe this week, but the words keep evading my mind. I think to paint a picture of the tension I have felt, we will start on Sunday.

Saturday and Sundays are my days for adventure. On adventure days, we plan things out the night in advance and then just have fun seeing where life takes us. For this Sunday adventure, Isaac and I went to explore the Columbia Gorge. The Columbia River runs to the north of Portland, splitting Oregon from Washington. The banks of the Columbia are lined with towering cliffs creating a gorge covered in trees and lined with waterfalls that flow off the cliffs. The gorge is one of the prettiest places I have been to while I am here and yet walking through this beauty you are reminded that there are scars that line the forest from fires that took out many of the trees along the Columbia a number of years back. You see trees chard black on one side void of life surrounded by bright green life that is springing up around them. There is a certain tension about it that is so profound.

I found the same tension as I worked with patients this week. A number of the patients that my clinical instructor assigned me at the beginning of the day had to cancel or didn’t show up for one reason or another and this meant I got to work with some new people. One of the men was especially difficult for me to treat. He has three different muscles torn in his shoulder that cause him pain with most motion and the doctor told him that he wasn’t sure surgery was the best option for him. He has been off work for two months and workers comp has not been sending him the money they said he would get. As you could imagine, when he came in he was pretty depressed. He was holding so much pain and struggle in his life and I so badly wanted to just make his shoulder better so that he at least wouldn’t have that pain anymore. No matter what I tried there was nothing that would relieve any of his pain and the things that he needed to do to help strengthen and gain motion back in his shoulder just caused more pain for him. It was hard to be someone who is supposed to help and yet I didn’t feel like I had any answers for him.

That was his first visit of the week. On his last visit of the week, he came in and said that he had gotten word from his work that he is finally going to get some of the money he was promised from being injured at work. He was so positive and talked about how much he felt like what I had done with his last treatment had helped him. Then as we completed the rest of his treatment for the day, you could see his improvement as we worked together. It was one of the highlights of my week, but the improvement was more significant because of the pain on the journey to his third visit.

It seems as though pain is a necessity in our lives. Our sin and struggle is something that must happen to form a story. It’s the place that God wants to come in and work. I have for a long time prayed that God would take my pain, my temptation, my brokenness away. That I would surrender that to him and would no longer have to fight through it. I am glad God doesn’t answer all my prayers. I have started to realize that my sin and pain is a reality. Like a wound or a patient's pain, I can’t just make it go away but there is a necessary healing process that we all must go through. This process is full of high points and low points. On our way, we will fall to temptation and we will have setbacks, but that is where God works till someday, we have the scars to show for it.

Scars are cool. They mark stories in our lives. I have a number of them…one from my friend’s roof, one from tackling a cow, one from a knife wound at church, and all unique in their own way. But without them, those stories would not be as significant. Like our physical scars when embraced, our scars are a story of God's healing in our lives. Without that pain and struggle what would we be able to say? Our stumbling blocks give testament to a God bigger than it all. A God that highlights our struggles by making them the climax of his story.

Pain being a necessary part of life is a hard tension to wrestle with. Still, it is hard to see others hurting and hard to feel that pain yourself.

I also went to a Jazz concert with the guys from my house. Jazz is another thing with a certain tension to it. It is not a genre of music that you just play what is on the page. You have to push the boundaries by improvising to really get something beautiful. The 1905 Jazz Club did just that. They rarely used music and embraced the music. They played with a passion and joy that fills the room and tells a story. A history of hours playing together, learning to not only love the music, but to love the process.

I hope someday I can learn to embrace my scars with such grace that they bring testimony to something greater, that they bring joy to those who hear their stories, and that the stories show the healer behind it all.

This was a little deeper than I normally try to keep this, but I wanted to be true to what I have been reflecting on. I’ll end this post with a link to a song that we have been singing at church every Sunday. I hope that it helps start your Easter week off strong.