God Enters Our Lives Through Our Wounds

"God enters our lives through our wounds," writes my friend.

This came to me this morning in a paper written for a study group meeting later today via Zoom.

These words fit my world well ... I've often wondered why God didn't fully heal my wounds, but I've learned over the years that my wounds have kept me humble.

I'm given to arrogance, spiritual and intellectual, but wounds mitigate that tendency, wounds that still seep and hurt.

Paul's "thorn in the flesh," whatever that may have been, was God's tool to keep an otherwise brilliant man, a man given to spiritual/intellectual arrogance, open to God's mercy and sensitive to the human condition.

I've thought in recent years - this is why the resurrected body of Jesus still bore the ugly wounds - the broken bones of his ankles and wrists, the spear thrust beneath his ribs, a forehead marked by the thorns. I think Jesus walked with a limp.

Even the son of God needed to be wounded, even in the state of resurrection, as to never be tempted to spiritual arrogance.

Calvin said, "We all walk with a limp." We have to walk a bit more slowly in our spirit, and it's harder to run away from God.

"By his bruises (wounds) we are healed," writes Isaiah 53.5. Those bruises are a passageway from the heart of God to the soul of humankind ... and in our daily walk with others, our own wounds become a similar passageway, from one to another - the healing balm of mercy, kindness, truth and justice.

God enters our lives through our wounds, and through our wounds, God enters the world.