pieces and ponderings

WARNING:  The following is about surgery scars and is not meant to be gross.

I have a three inch scar down the middle of my lower abdomen.  It’s surrounded by four smaller scars, all from surgery that I had a few months ago.  I noticed the larger scar this morning as I was finishing taking a shower.  I hopped into and out of the shower quickly as I got ready for the day.  I remembered how that wasn’t even possible just a short time ago because of the incision that caused the scar.  There was no shower hopping.  There were lots of bandages and tape and stuff and absolutely NO hopping…none, notta, zilch on the hopping.

A few weeks after the surgery, I was wondering if the incision would ever heal.  On the whole my recovery has gone well, but it took that long incision a long time to close.  The healing process was taking place the whole time, but it wasn’t always visible to me.  What was visible to me made me very squeamish.  In fact, for a time I just didn’t look at my middle if I could avoid it…it’s how I survived those few weeks.

But today, there is a nice scar.  (You can call a scar “nice” when it is no longer an open wound.)  The scar is still tender to the touch.  There is still pain sometimes, but nothing like there was.

Scars are reminders of injuries and hurts.  Some hurts and injuries are planned, like my surgery.  The injury was necessary so that a greater healing could occur.  But some injuries aren’t planned…they just happen…and they might leave deep scars.

Around the time of my surgery I had been reading a lot in the gospel of Luke about Jesus choosing to die on the cross.  After Jesus died and rose again, the scars from his wounds were visible.  There are a couple of places in the Bible where he told his followers to look at his hands and his feet…to touch his side.  The people who saw the resurrected Jesus saw his scars…the scars of his planned injury…the fatal injury that would bring much needed healing to the rest of us.