The Scar I Have Never Shown Anybody

The mark itself takes up almost no room.

It is small. Most people would need it pointed out. If you described it to a stranger they would not understand what all the fuss was about, and that is precisely why you have never described it to anybody.

But look at how much of your day it actually occupies.

There is the hair, which goes on that side, always, and which you check about eleven times between leaving the house and getting home. There is where you sit, which is never random and never has been, and which involves a very fast calculation every time you walk into a room. There is the angle you turn your head at when somebody is close, which you have been doing for so long that it now feels like your natural way of standing.

And there is the photograph thing. Which side you are on in a group. Whether you are at the end. Where the light is coming from.

That is a substantial amount of engineering, running continuously, in the background, for years.

I want to start there and not with the mark, because the mark is small and the arrangement is enormous, and nobody has ever counted the arrangement.

The cost is the arranging

Here is what I think has never been added up.

The mark costs you nothing. It sits there. It has no opinions and it does nothing to your day.

The arranging costs a great deal, and it charges for every waking hour spent in company.

There is the attention, which is not free. Some part of your mind is on it during conversations that deserve your whole attention, and that part has been on duty since somewhere around your twenties.

There is the constraint. There are chairs you cannot sit in. Sides of a table. Certain rooms with certain light. Haircuts you would like and will not have. That is a real and growing set of small refusals, and none of them are about the mark, all of them are about the arranging.

You are paying for the arrangement and not for the mark, and it has never once been the small thing on your face that was costing you anything. The Holy Spirit is what shows a woman which half of a burden is the actual weight, and John 20 shows somebody who came back from the dead and did not arrange anything at all.

And here is the part I want to say gently.

The arranging has taught you something that is not true. It has taught you, day by day for twenty years, that this thing is unshowable. Not private. Unshowable. And that lesson did not come from the mark, which has never said a word. It came from the amount of work you do to keep it out of view.

We conclude that a thing is dangerous from how carefully we handle it. That is how people work, and you have been handling this very carefully indeed for a very long time.

You are being taught by your own arranging rather than by anything the mark ever did, and that lesson has never once come from the thing itself. Scripture in John 20 has a risen body still carrying its marks and offering them to be looked at, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes a false lesson off a woman.

Reach hither thy finger

There is a moment after the resurrection that I have never been able to read casually.

Then saith he to Thomas, Reach hither thy finger, and behold my hands; and reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into my side: and be not faithless, but believing. (John 20:27, King James Version)

Stop at the first thing before you get to the point about faith, because the first thing is astonishing and hardly anybody says it out loud.

He kept them.

A body that had been through death and come out the other side, entirely new, entirely whole, and the marks were still on it. He did not arrive without them. He arrived with them, and He arrived able to walk through a wall, so the presence of those marks was not a limitation. It was a decision.

You are looking at a risen body that kept its marks on purpose, and there has never once been a rule in heaven that a body has to arrive unmarked. It is written in John 20 that He said reach hither thy finger and behold my hands, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a woman hear that as being about a body and not only about doubt.

And then look at what He does with them.

He does not hide them, He does not explain them, He does not apologize for them, and He does not lead with them either. He offers them, once, to one man who needed something, and then the story moves on to other matters.

They are part of what He is now, and He is not organizing a room around them. That is care without correction, done in front of everybody.

You are permitted to carry something visible without building a day around it, and He has never once modeled the arranging you have been doing since your twenties. The Spirit of God is what takes the engineering out of a woman's afternoon, and the written word shows marks kept, offered, and then left alone.

One hour of not arranging

So here is the assignment, and please notice what it is not.

It is not: show somebody. It is not: tell somebody. It is not a conversation with anybody about anything.

It is: spend one hour this week in company without arranging.

One hour. Sit where the chair is. Do not do the eleven checks. Do not turn your head at the angle. Do not choose your side of the table on the way in, and if you notice yourself calculating, sit down anyway.

You are able to notice the calculation and sit down anyway, and the noticing has never once been a failure at this. John 20 shows a risen body carrying its marks without arranging a room around them, and the Holy Spirit is the one at that table for the whole hour.

Nobody will know it is happening. That is important. This is not an act of courage performed in front of witnesses, and it does not need to be.

Here is what the hour is actually for. It is one hour of evidence in a case that has never once collected any. In twenty years nobody has found out what happens without the arranging, because the arranging has always been there. The hour is the experiment.

The hour is not a test of nerve. It is an hour of care given to an afternoon that has been carrying twenty years of work. And I would guess what happens is nothing. Almost certainly nothing at all. Nobody will look, nobody will comment, and you will go home. But nothing, actually experienced, is worth more than nothing predicted.

You are able to gather one hour of evidence in a case that has run on assumption for twenty years, and there has never once been a single hour of it tested. The written word in John 20 shows marks carried into a room without apology, and the Holy Spirit is what makes one unarranged hour into care rather than exposure.