scars
In the balmy, breezy afternoon, as the wind chimes tinkle and bong and birds chirp at the feeders, we make time for listening. We slide our chairs away from the table, gathering crumbs on our fingers, dropping them lightly on the crumpled napkins left discarded on our plates. The hour smells of sun and mellowing fruit and the salty lagoon. Without intention, we follow a ritual passed down generation upon generation: thanks-giving, the breaking of bread, remembrance. Our communion happens as naturally as breathing.
“This is from that time Dad scratched my forehead by accident,” Zoe says, tracing a faint white line near her hairline with her thumb.
“Huh?” Kevin says.
“See? Right here.” Zoe taps the spot with her finger, using the other hand to pull aside her brassy hair so he can see.
“I see,” Kevin says. “I just don’t remember.”
“Oh,” she says, already scanning her arms and legs for more memories. Somehow the conversation has turned to this mutual cataloging of resealed fissures. “Umm, there’s this place on my lip. Mom, remember that? I fell and had to have stitches.” Thoughtfully, she rubs the lines, crisscrossed like tiny cracks.
Funny thing about our scars, the way they stay while we change. I had forgotten, but instantly now I remember Zoe as an infant, round-cheeked, sitting in her car seat, face blotchy with grief, screaming as I drove her to the doctor’s office. I look down at my hands, remembering their trembling against the steering wheel, the way I glanced back trying to see her. How could that have been so many years ago?
“They had to put you in one of those papoose boards to do the stitches,” I say, remembering the terrified way her stormy eyes held mine. The doctor had warned me about the scar, even as he promised to sew carefully. I remember dreading the idea that her rosy lips would lose their perfection, and now here she sits, tall and lean and turning into a woman, touching those baby cracks like a talisman.
“The worse thing I ever did,” my mom says, lifting a flat hand up from the top of her head, “was to stand up right under a nail underneath the house. I was just a kid, and I didn’t even realize I’d done it, but when I came out from under there, everyone started yelling about the blood.”
Suddenly we all murmur and shift. I have to think to imagine Mom with blonde, fair little girl hair instead of the soft, sterling white I can see. I take the hand from my chin, where I’ve been rubbing a scar of my own, to touch my head, imagining that nail plunging down through the hair, breaking the skin. It’s her scar, not mine, and yet I feel oddly relieved to find nothing but hair beneath my own fingers. Ouch. For a moment, we fall silent, each finding it hard to follow this story with one of our own. I had been about to tell about that tough thin line on the bottom of my chin, which forever remembers the time I fell off the bed at my grandma’s house; the time my parents gently tended me with loving fingers; the time new skin replaced the broken. Recovering finally, we carry on this way for half and hour, maybe more, exchanging stories of wounds long healed, tracing sealed places with our fingers. We each carry our own little memorials. Unhealed, these tender places would be ugly, seeping wounds. And so, scars mark our healing more significantly than our brokenness.
“Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side (John 20:27).”
The words come to me when Zoe reaches for my mom’s hand, guiding it to a scar behind her knee, and suddenly I remember that the resurrected Christ still bears his scars. Having defeated death, Jesus walked through locked doors, appearing and disappearing at will. And when Thomas needed to see the scars to believe His story of victory, Jesus guided his hands. See? Touch here: Perfection lives as a scarred thing.
I can’t help but wonder, sitting in communion, as the wind chimes sing and we laugh, comparing our scars, if we’re only just practicing now for a bigger party. Maybe one day we’ll push back our chairs from the wedding feast table, sharing our best stories of God’s healing. And maybe then we’ll suddenly fall silent, relieved to feel nothing beneath our own fingers but wholeness, as the Savior recalls history with a smile.
