Scars.

We try to define you, to make you easy to understand. To grab and yank and push and pull and try to control you. We wrap you up in ideas and sayings and anything that looks nice and pretty because the unresolved is painful to our Western souls.

But You are so much more. You are ever so much more. And I wanna know you as you are, not as I want you to be. I want you to be bigger than a list of characteristics to rattle off, deeper than a formula for a way to live. Get down deep in my heart. It's cracked and beat up, scarred and totally imperfect, but if you'll have it, it's yours. I have only the tiniest glimpse of how beautiful it could be, you here with me. Cause these cracks? They can be the start, like the first tear in a birthday present, of you getting down to what's inside. The bruises? They can find the grace to heal in your hands. All my weariness? I'm told there is rest where you are. And oh how I want to believe that: that I can lay down, and stop striving. That I don't have to be anything, anything except with you.

You whisper again that you know what it is to be scarred. And as you reach your hand out, I feel the tissue where they healed, and the imperfection of it all--how can you, holy and perfect, wear imperfection still? I forget you still choose to be like me in this, that I might remember: that's how far you came. And that I don't have to be perfect or tied up in pretty ribbons or even whole because nothing is yet as it will be. You wait, and you long for us, until you can come and take us from all of this. When finally there will be nothing in between us but love and joy in one another forever. And you yearn, from the deepest part of you [and how deep is the heart of God? Is there any measure for it?] for us to know you now. To delight in you, because you have loved us with everything you are. [And what is the measure of that?] You gave everything, absolutely everything, up to come and take our hands and all our brokenness and lead us home. And you still wear those scars, the scars of my rebellion, to remind: that you came that far. That you chose me, knowing the cost, and would choose me all over again. You wear those scars like a tattoo, a declaration to all who see of just how far love will go. You wear them still to remind me that it's ok to bring my scars. That I will be scarred by this world, this life. But that just as you rose from death to life, and just as you later brought us with you, wounds don't ever have to be the last word with you. Your scars, they display your power. They're memorials of the day when you flipped everything upside down and death itself turned backwards- so what can you NOT do?

Surely my weak knees and frail arms and fickle heart are not too much for you. Surely they can't turn back your love, love that came so far and already paid the fullness of its cost. Surely those scarred hands that hold me close even when I squirm and fight and yell like a four-year old that I don't want you and can take care of myself and when I am a broken 7 year old who just needs and needs and when I am a 20-something who thinks she knows far more than she does and is slow to actually learn-surely those hands, those arms, are big enough, strong enough, to take me-all my weaknesses and scars and fears and shame and pride included- and make me whole. Not flawless. Those aren't the same thing. You leave my scars, my limps, because they are testimonies of what you have done. Could you make me whole and leave no trace? Of course. But then I would miss every bit of the beauty, the wonder, of pointing to my scars and saying, "See that? That was a deep wound; it pained me for years. He healed it." and "This one? This sin kept me wrapped up for a long time. It owned me but I didn't even know I was enslaved. It's still healing, you can see. Isn't He so good, to set me free? To teach me how to live free?" The scars are the stories of your faithfulness. You didn't have to heal us-but you did. You could have left me lost and broken-but love is never content with less than what's best for the beloved.

You wear your scars because they are the proof of what you went through to bring us home; and if we live this life trying to look like you, laying ourselves down, dying to all our selfish pride, and suffer for any and all if that's what it takes (and it does) to love like you, then we might just have some to match yours when we get home.