After-Easter Stitches

You know it’s going to be a rough day when, first thing in the morning, someone carves a chunk of skin out of your arm.

And when you pay someone to do it? Well, that’s even worse.

Yeah, that's the way my day began this morning. You can see the resulting handiwork in the picture. I'm hoping the eventual scar winds up looking cool and manly. Perhaps I can tell people that I received it swordfighting or something, when the truth will be far more prosaic.

A few weeks ago, my dermatologist informed me that a bothersome mole would have to go. I was a little surprised, given that the mole had been with me for much of my adult life and it had never expressed discontent with his situation. It was not particularly troublesome, nor (as moles go) even all that ugly. The only time it ever seemed at all peevish was shortly after my dermatologist performed a tiny biopsy on part of it. After that, it turned red, one can only assume from anger.

My dermatologist didn't like the look of the thing at all. And after the results of the biopsy came back, he said the mole would have to be forcibly evicted from my arm. It wasn't cancerous, he said: Not yet. But it was "atypical," and it was displaying a particularly fearsome form of atypical-ness. Which leads me to believe that my mole was the anatomical equivalent of a quiet, unassuming neighbor that one day, out of the blue, drags all of his living room furniture out on the front lawn and sets it on fire.  So with that in mind, I let the doctor excise a diamond-shaped section of skin about the size of a quarter. Then he stitched the thing up like a medieval purse and sent me on my way.

Technically, the little out-patient operation wasn't that big of a deal at all--less serious, maybe, than getting a tooth filled. (It was certainly less painful.) I know people deal with far worse things. But even so, it's left me feeling a little frail. I've been told not to lift anything over 10 pounds. Technically, I shouldn't run for two weeks (which'll put a serious crimp in my marathon training). And even though the mole wasn't yet cancerous, it's strange, and a little disturbing, to think of your own body working against you. It's like having a sleeper cell on your body, scheming away.

When we're reasonably healthy and happy, it's easy to forget that we're quite frail creatures. I felt my weakness after running this weekend. I sensed my own fragility while watching basketball yesterday—when Louisville’s Kevin Ware suffered a catastrophic injury doing something as routine as jumping.

But maybe that’s part of the poignancy and beauty of Easter, just now passed. Jesus was weak, just as we all are. He hurt, just like we do. He bled when beaten, struggled for breath on the cross and died—just as we all someday will. I have a hard time wrapping my mind around why He had to suffer so … but maybe part of it was to remind us all not only of His human frailty, but ours. He reminded us that, sometimes, circumstances can swamp us. Our human strength can only take us so far—and in times of crisis, that’s not necessarily very far at all.

“Frail,” by Jars of Clay, is one of my favorite songs, beautiful and true:

If I was not so weak
  If I was not so cold
If I was not so scared of being broken
Growing old
I would be … frail.

And yet God—indescribably great, unfathomably powerful—works through weakness. Almost every biblical hero you can think of came from ignominy or dealt with near-crippling flaws. And Easter is a continuation of that.

On Good Friday, we commemorated not just a death, but a humiliation: A man stretched out in the most vulnerable pose imaginable, exposed to the elements and abuse and ridicule. Crucifixion was designed, it would seem, to humiliate. To exploit human weakness. To take would-be heroes or martyrs and turn them into pitiable, prosaic lumps of flesh.

And on Easter, we celebrated. In that moment of ultimate weakness came eternal triumph. Crazy.

We are weak creatures, yes. But God can do remarkable things in our frailty. And even as I’m reminded a bit of my own weakness, I’m reminded that God sometimes does his best work through folks as weak and as whiny as I am. 

Searching for Sugar Man ... Finding a Miracle

I may have grown up in the ‘80s, but I’m emotionally a child of the ‘60s and ‘70s. When all my school chums were listening to Tiffany and Rick Astley (well, some of them were, anyway), I was grooving to Carole King and Simon & Garfunkel. I know, I know. Geeky. I never even learned to moon walk. I never claimed to be cool.

But geeky or no, I think I would’ve been a big fan of Rodriguez back in high school … had I ever heard of him.

But I hadn’t. No one had. The guy released two or three albums in the early 1970s that flopped in America—more never-was than has-been. But then, a decade after the guy failed miserably, something amazing happened. He became incredibly popular in South Africa of all places. His music became one of the impetuses to overturn apartheid. He—well, why don’t you just watch the trailer?

Searching for Sugar Man won the Academy Award for Best Documentary just a couple of weeks ago. Well deserving, I think. Great story, great music. Check it out if you have a couple hours to spare. I think you’d enjoy it even if you can’t tell your Kings from your Croces or your Simons from your Garfunkels.

But the thing that makes it worth talking about on this particular blog is this:

At the very end of the trailer, you hear someone say that “these are the days of miracles and wonder,” a phrase most often used when folks would stumble across burning bushes and snack on manna and the like. And indeed, the story of Rodriguez seems almost miraculous—not only the man’s improbable success a continent and culture far, far away, but in the fact that everybody in South Africa thought he was dead.

Spoiler alert: He wasn’t—just living a quiet, below-the-poverty-line-life in Detroit. Here was a man whose music everyone knew. He was a part of their lives, their culture and, most importantly, the welcome change that took place there after ages of racism. And all his fans knew—they knew—the guy was dead and gone. And then, one day, they learn he’s doing just fine—and if they’d like to see for themselves, he’ll be playing a concert or two.

In a way, it’d be like if I’d learned that C.K. Chesterton was alive and well (and around 150 years old), tinkering with a blog somewhere in the suburbs of London. Or that Ghandi didn’t die; he was just resting up to inspire yet another generation.

It’d be like if someone like, oh, someone like Jesus had risen from the grave.

I don’t say that to be flip or heretical. I just think that, sometimes, we folks who have been Christians for a long time can lose sight about what a big deal the whole resurrection was. Oh, we know it’s big, of course. Religions don’t set up holidays for minor happenings. But because many of us have heard about Easter from before we can remember, we take it for granted.

But Searching for Sugar Man helped me see Easter in a ever-so-slightly new light—gave me the merest of inklings of what it must’ve felt like to have seen Jesus crucified … and then three days later, have the same Jesus serve me breakfast.

If Jesus had been just a great moral teacher—a guy who was way ahead of his time and spoke up for the weak and downtrodden, a guy who helped the people around him and for millennia after—his life would’ve still been worth remembering. He would’ve been Jesus Christ Superstar; a man who through his words and deed, would’ve set the world on a new, exciting path. And his tragic, painful death would’ve been reason for the whole world to cry.

And then, one day, we learn that he’s not dead at all. He’s living. Not figuratively, but literally. And suddenly, all the thoughts we followers have of him—our ideas of how profound and how wise and how gentle and brave he was—is joined by another, wholly unexpected emotion: Incredulous, unbridled joy.

May we all feel a bit of that joy in the days and weeks to come.