Scars
A Saturday Story
I have a system for getting through airport security with as little hassle as possible. I won’t bore you with the details, but I rarely get any extra scrutiny. It’s nothing shady. I just minimize any reason to get extra attention. Every airport is different, but there are things you can do to mitigate the hassle.
Some of the places I travel through have separate security lines for men and women. The women go into an enclosed closet-like space with curtains to be vetted by other women in private. The men are searched out in the open, usually scanned with a hand wand while standing on a small box-like platform. What purpose the platform serves I can’t say. I assume it is merely to make the job of the security officer easier. Less bending over.
It was while standing on one of these platforms, being scanned with a smallish tennis racket without the strings wand that something happened I had anticipated. It had never happened before, therefore I was surprised it happened then. When the security agent passed the wand over my right ankle it beeped its warning sound. He seemed a little perplexed and so he repeated the process three times to confirm it was alerting on my ankle.
He looked up at me. “Surgery,” I said.
He didn’t speak English. I nodded and pointed at my ankle, trying to indicate I would show him why my ankle was setting off his metal detector. I bent over, pulled my pant leg up, rolled my sock down, and revealed the several-inch-long scar running along the length of my ankle.
He nodded that he understood. Their method of head shaking isn’t like ours. It is not an up-and-down “yes,” nor a side-to-side “no.” It is a wobble that you are left to interpret. With a little cultural acclimation, interpretation becomes second nature. With a little extra time in the country, you even find your head wobbling a little too, though probably not as smoothly or naturally as the native people.
The security officer waved his wand forward, the business endpoint toward the ground, using it like an extension of his hand to indicate I could step down and move on. I rolled my sock up and my pant leg down and stepped down from the platform and toward the conveyor belt where my other belongings waited for my retrieval.
My scar was all the proof I needed to legitimize my claim to having had metal surgically implanted into my ankle. Scars do that. They tell a story. Scars are the present evidence of past suffering. They are reminders, a sort of hieroglyphic writing that gives clues to our past. Scars are hints. We see them and know that something happened, something harsh, something that tore the flesh and created pain; but we need some explanation to fully understand their existence.
Like most people, I have numerous scars. There is the one on my right forearm. My brothers and I were building a fort and as luck would have it someone dumped an old car seat in the ditch down the road from our house. The three of us set out to get it and bring it home. We alternated carrying it between two of us at a time, the third getting a break for a few steps before reentering the rotation. It was during my break I had the brilliant flash of insight that I could run and jump up on the seat and my brothers would be forced to carry me like an Egyptian prince.
They had other ideas. As soon as I landed with a thud on the dirty vinyl cushion, my brothers turned loose of their burden. The seat came crashing onto the gravel road with my right arm underneath it and one of the seat springs impaled into my forearm. An otherwise normal childhood event has never been forgotten because the scar still speaks.
Then there is the one on my left knee. I slipped on wet asphalt while trying to run across it in football cleats. They grip great in the grass. Wet asphalt not so much.
The other knee has one from being stabbed with a pencil by an angry fellow 8th-grade classmate. I never knew what I did to incur his ire. I think he didn’t like newcomers, of which I was one. To make matters worse the teacher got upset with me not him. I yelped when the pencil broke my flesh and was promptly sent to the hallway. I went further down the hall to the bathroom to inspect my fresh wound.
There is a small one hidden under my eyebrow from a fall onto the sidewalk when I was four. Nearby is the one that reminds me that pouring water on hot asphalt roads in August makes for a nice slick spot to skid a bicycle through, but you better keep it upright. I didn’t and found myself lying in the road with a head gash from which blood was running at a good clip.
The one on my ring finger - a slip off of a ladder and snagging my wedding ring on the way down.
Left thumb – don’t get in such a hurry when using a hole saw.
Etc. …
Some scars are not visible. They aren’t jagged lines in flesh, but instead, they come from hurts that have marred the heart or mind. Scars, nonetheless.
I think, though I can’t prove it, our resurrection bodies will be without scars. Maybe all the pain of the past will be forgotten as much as the sin that might have accompanied them forgiven. But then again, maybe we will get to keep them to remind us how much God’s mercy and grace brought us through. Maybe we will look at them and the sight of them will evoke gratitude for all that Jesus Christ has brought us through. As you can tell, I don’t know.
But if our scars from this life are absent in the next, I think that maybe the scars of Jesus Christ will remain. Our eternity is built on Him, His death, and His resurrection. We partake in the Lord’s Supper to remember that. His scars might serve as an eternally visible reminder of His death on our behalf. Again, I’m guessing. We shall see. And what remains and what is removed will be for the best. Because God is good at doing what is best.
