Let Love Heal Your Battle Scars

AS IT IS with a cracked vessel that lets light in – the light of truth – truth that gently tends toward healing – so it is that through those cracks love ekes in and begins the process of healing those battle scars we’ve long not dealt with.

But we must allow love in, and love can only enter through our acknowledged brokenness. Where we present as whole, pretending we have it all together, as if a vessel with no cracks, not only does light not get through, but neither does the love we need – the love of God and of those concerned for us – get through either. We are not being vulnerable enough.

Vulnerability, to be sure, is seeing ourselves, and revealing ourselves, as cracked vessels. Where there are cracks – where are open and vulnerable – there we have the opportunity at healing.

Loving Every Lack Within Us

There are ironies packed upon paradoxes in life – all of them are mysteries packed upon enigmas.

Now this is the deal:

We have to come close to God in order to experience the closeness of God – as if God were close. We, who know he is close, don’t know it until we decide to come close. We come close by acknowledging our lack, our need of him, our sin in his Almighty Presence.

Love heals us by cleansing then binding the wounds of our battle scars when we allow it to attend to our lack. Our lack is where we are scarred. Our lack is that place that proudly protects itself, because it is embarrassed.

Loving our lack – acknowledging it as a pitiable weakness – is about the strength of openness to know that if we can endure what would be embarrassing, even humiliating, we can allow the love we need to come in.

Our lack – and everyone has lack – is the magnum opus of being human. We fool ourselves when we think we lack nothing. We are fooling nobody.

The biggest irony of life is the more flawed we admit ourselves to be, the closer to God we are, and the closer to the brush of his healing hand are we.

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Love can heal our battle scars, but we must first drop our defense. Love can heal us, but we need to acknowledge our need or we will never be free. Love can do that work of transformation. We need to simply get out of its way.

© 2013 S. J. Wickham.