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. 

Hurting

No more.

This is my primal, belly-deep cry as we reel from the news of another mass killing—this one perpetrated against the youngest, the most innocent. My brain races with a thousand thoughts; my heart hurts for the parents and kids; my soul asks the same questions yours does.

But my gut, it hollers. It begs. No more. No more.

Another gunman, shrouded in a bulletproof vest and armed with multiple guns, made news this morning. He walked into Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Conn., and opened fire. By the time he took his own life, at least 27 others were either dead or dying—20 of them children. A tragedy, we say.

But we’ve used that word so often in the last few years that it doesn’t seem to be enough. It can’t convey the anguish and desolation felt in Newtown tonight. Tragedy is too weak a word now. 

And I wonder … what were these children thinking about, talking about, five minutes before? Were they counting down the minutes ‘til Christmas vacation? Were they debating what to do at recess? Were they contemplating a mystery gift—a wrapped box underneath the tree—that they couldn’t wait to find out what it was?

Yesterday, I wrote of the infinite, that sense of promise and potential that youth feel so mightily at times. This evening, those words haunt me: For 20 children, that promise and potential was silenced. Twenty children found true infinite too soon.

We grieve now. As parents and children ourselves—no matter how distant we are from Connecticut, we grieve. We pray for the survivors, for the hurting parents, maybe the whole country. Perhaps, we try to console … if not those in Newtown, then at least ourselves. As Christians, perhaps, we try to offer what comfort we can. We remind (ourselves?) that God is with us in even these moments. That He feels our pain more sharply than we can imagine. That, even now, even in this, God is in control. That, perhaps even now, He embraces these little children and walks them into His eternal country.

I believe it. I believe it all. I believe that God can work through even the worst of moments. I’ve written so in the past—back when Aurora was the tragedy.

Less than five months ago.

It’s comforting to know, I suppose, that the Psalmists walked through moments and months like this, where the world seemed sick to the soul and the poets begged for relief.

My heart is in anguish within me

The terrors of death assail me.

Fear and trembling have beset me;

Horror has overwhelmed me.

I said, ‘Oh, that I had the wings of a dove!

I would fly away and be at rest—I would flee far away and stay in the desert;

I would hurry to my place of shelter,

Far from the tempest and storm.

Psalm 55:4-6

And at the end of these anguished cries, the concluding lines are often the same. In Psalm 55, the last line is very simple: “But as for me, I trust in you.”

We hurt. We cry out. We long for the world to be made well—or, barring that, just better. Just saner. Just keep the killers from our children. Just keep the wolves from our door.

But God makes no promises. And so we walk on in the pit of tragedy, under the shadow of death. And in the end, all we can do is trust. That God will walk with us. That God, no matter what comes, is with us and cares for us and is, in his sometimes inexplicable way, leading us Home.