The doctor looked at me with concern in her eyes.

My heart skipped. “What’s wrong? Is the infection not clearing up? Is it not healing?”

“Well, there’s still signs of an infection,” she admitted. “But what I’m really worried about is that you won’t heal quickly.” She cringed.

“Which means…” I coaxed.

“Which means you could have a scar.”

I exhaled and smiled a little. “I don’t care if I have a scar. I just want it to heal!”

It is healing. And I will indeed have a scar. The doc confirmed it during my recent follow-up visit.

Another of my few visible physical scars. And one more among dozens that the experiences of life have left on my mind, heart, and soul.

I’ve recently finished polishing the manuscript for my first novel – a piece with the working title of The Voice of Melody. The story incorporates several themes; a major one is the question of suffering and dealing with life circumstances that could either render us crippled, powerless – or refine us for some greater purpose and later empower us with a greater strength. At one point, a father counsels his daughter on that topic, and the wisdom he passes on to her sustains her through several subsequent trials.

In essence, he says that scars are left behind for us to remember what we’ve gone though so we can live as grateful people: grateful for death or greater pain we have been spared, and grateful for any mercy we have been shown.

If we never went through the difficult things, we wouldn’t know the meaning of gratitude because we wouldn’t recognize our need to be grateful. To paraphrase my colleague, Tony, it is those scars (hard times) that can make us thankful for all the goodness in life.

I will have a scar on my head. And every time I feel it, I can remember how God helped the doctor to catch the cyst before it became too threatening, how He helped her to remove all the tissue to spare me from greater trouble.

And I can be thankful that I am alive today, alive to give and to bless.

In a week when many Americans will pause to count their blessings, let us count all of them. The obvious. The commonplace. The miraculous. And the scar-laced.

What is it about my air-brushed, age-defying home culture that so dislikes reminders of the dirty, disgusting, and painful?

A student recently asked why most American bathrooms don’t have a floor drain (outside of the shower/bathtub) – a feature that is prevalent in many countries where indoor plumbing is widely used. I thought about it for awhile and finally concluded that one of the main reasons is because a floor drain can be both an eyesore and a source of smelliness. Both of these remind us of the dirt and germs so many of us are crazy about avoiding.

And apart from my vegan and vegetarian friends, what right-minded American doesn’t love a good hunk of meat? Yet, if we once again compare the American diet (and local supermarket) with that of most other cultures around the world, we find something interesting. We don’t like our “animals” to look like animals. Apart from the bones in hot wings, KFC meals, and barbecued ribs, there’s not a thing left behind in most of our meat choices to remind us that it was an animal. And even those exceptions are usually covered in so much breading or sauce we won’t think about how it was part of a living being a short time before. No yummy fish heads in our soup, no chickens’ feet to nibble along with the rest of our dinner. Some would say it’s simply a matter of convenience. It’s so much easier, after all, to cook and eat a boneless breast than to deal with a whole chicken. But I would argue that we also don’t want to think about the disgusting nature of the butchering process and what that animal went through so that we might be nourished.

A new ad popped up while I was watching TV last night. It urged every viewer to ask “What pain?” – to keep playing and pushing and moving no matter what. Have pain? No worries! Take this pill and your pain will roll back so you can perform as hard as ever! Like eating around the bones, pain slows me down and makes life feel messy. And why in the world would I want that?

I’ll tell you two reasons why.

Pain tells us where we are in the healing process. I’m continuing to heal from a procedure performed under my scalp. At various stages of my recovery, I’ve experienced different levels and types of pain. I took a bit of Tylenol in the beginning to help with the worst of it, but since then I’ve done nothing to mask the pain. It is my body’s way of telling me what’s going on – especially when I can’t see the wound. Likewise, when someone or something hurts my heart, how sensitive my heart remains towards that person or topic serves as a litmus test for how well my heart wound is healing.

Pain reminds us that we cannot go it alone – and we were not designed to. Some people do their best to deaden or ignore their pain (physical and/or emotional) so they can appear strong before others – or be strong for others. But the bittersweet beauty of pain is that it can and should drive each person into the strength that only God and community can provide. It gives us the perfect excuse for living humble lives – and opportunities for us to seek reasons to be thankful either after or in the midst of the discomfort.

I invite your comments on the place of physical/emotional pain in our lives and will address this topic further in next week’s post. 

(photo credit: http://www.businessinsider.com/this-automatic-shotgun-fires-360-rounds-bad-intentions-per-minute-2017-5)

My Chinese students are obsessed with guns.

More specifically, they are both terrified and fascinated with what they perceive as an America-wide love of gun ownership. One student wrote about his family fearing for his safety when he came to the States to complete his degree. They were sure there would be lots of average citizens carrying firearms around on the streets, pulling those weapons out to aggressively use them whenever an opportunity arose.

I’ve spent the first half of this semester in our culture course trying to help these students see the history of, various opinions on, and motivations for gun ownership in the U.S. Thankfully, they’ve observed that (most days) our community is quite safe.

But then they read the news.

When I watch news coming out of Las Vegas night after night, I hear how investigators seeking a clear motive for last weekend’s massacre are baffled at nearly every turn. One by one, they have ruled out the clear cut and the usual. Extreme religious ideologies, chemical imbalances in the brain, mental illness, crimes of passion. Those closest to the shooter were surprised by his behavior and didn’t see such an attack coming.

I have not desire to oversimplify the matter and thereby belittle those who are grieving or mock the professionals who are trying hard to do a great job.

But when I ponder this, my mind returns repeatedly to some of Jesus’ words from one of his most famous sermons:

“The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are good, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eyes are bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light within you is darkness, how great is that darkness.”

Sometimes, the basic or only motivation for committing an harmful act is: pure evil.

I rarely hear anyone speak in those terms these days. This is a day and age where biological progression should have made us rise above such base instincts and act in enlightened ways, where we have a pill to take to cure – or mask – nearly every illness and syndrome. We like to say that it doesn’t matter what I choose to dwell on or do with my time as long as I’m not “hurting other people.”

But what happens when what we’ve been feeding our bodies, minds, and hearts simmers until it boils over? What happens when we act upon the darker nature that resides in us all?

If one will admit that there is indeed evil in the world, what does one do about?

The only thing that will overcome darkness is light, and the only thing that will overcome evil is good.

More or different laws will only treat the wound on the surface. And threats do little to touch corruption so deep. To cure the cancer that runs through our society – and the world – eyes, minds, and souls must be filled with the Light of the World. And people must take daily responsibility for their personal choices and actions.

The news is ugly. So I watch little of it. Just enough to know the basics – and to be reminded of the fragile, broken world I inhabit.

It makes me sad to think of all the hateful things that have been said and done in both the past weeks and the past centuries. It makes me even sadder to recall all the zealots, fascists, bigots, and other radicals who have backed up their beliefs, claims, and propaganda by waving a banner of religion over their proud heads.

There have been many things done in Jesus’ name that Jesus would never condone. And any claim of ethnic superiority is one of them.

How do I know? Because Jesus was bi-racial. And so am I.

“What?” you say. “Jesus wasn’t bi-racial. He had one of the purest Jewish blood lines possible, well-recorded in ancient manuscripts. And you certainly don’t look bi-racial.”

But He was, and I am.

True, I am of European decent, with ancestors from at least six countries – a bit of the Scandinavian and a lot of the Anglo-Saxon. So by nationality I am American, and I always mark myself as Caucasian on surveys.

And after I had lived in China long enough, though I had no real shot at becoming a Chinese citizen, my students did me the honor of proclaiming that I was now an “egg” – white on the outside but yellow on the inside. I was deeply touched by their observation.

Those things are fine, but they are not what I’m talking about. Let me tell you about the races I identify with most strongly.

The first race is the human race. Human beings are my family. You are my family. It doesn’t matter where your ancestors came from, what country or state you grew up in, or what type of immediate family background you have. You are my brother or sister in humanity, and each of us was made by God’s hand, in His image. In the eighth psalm, King David writes that God made people amazingly well, just a tiny step below angels, and crowned us with glory and honor. And He created wondrous variety.

The second race is the life race. We are all running from our earliest years to the day we die. Some of us will run a longer race than others. However, the race can be grueling and the completion can get ugly. That’s because the honored, crowned products of the Creator have all fallen short of His glory, the glory we were originally endowed with. This is where we start to outdo each other in peer and self destruction. As with any race, life has a goal. And I’ve found that what or who I’m running toward at my finish line makes all the difference in how I live my life now.

Jesus was a part of the human race, but He was the only one to ever complete life’s race without falling short of that original goodness. I, on the other hand, am fully human and have fully fallen (before being lifted again by mercy). But the point is that both of us–and each of you–are bi-racial, no matter what our ethnic identification.

Now… if we could only remember those details every time we view the individuals around us.

Why are we often taught or encouraged not to cry by other members of society? Men may feel they’ll be seen as lacking masculinity, women may fear being branded as unprofessional, weak, or overly-emotional – depending on the setting they are in, and children may receive cruel taunts from their peers.

But tears are a wonderful thing, given to us by God. He designed us fearfully well, and that includes every last detail: not a mistake among them. Pause to think for a moment about what tears do for us.

They keep our eyes moist. A doctor recently put me on a prescription drug I’d never been on before. I woke up early this morning to discover one of the drug’s side effects in me – some of the driest eyes I’d ever had. At that moment, I wanted nothing more than to grab some eye drops (something I almost never need to do).

They keep our hearts tender. Life circumstances over the past six weeks have driven me to cry far more than I have in a long time. While I am still careful about who I cry in front of (a trait I cannot seem to avoid), I know that releasing emotion through a good  cry – sometimes more than once a day – has helped me to keep a healthy perspective and a heart that flies above fear to continue loving.

They keep our souls open. No matter if they are tears of sadness, happiness, frustration, or some other emotion, they open a temporary chasm where, sometimes only for a moment, the deepest core of you and I can be touched by the fingers of eternity. In our rawness, with nothing to hide us, we are simply self before God and any other(s) who might witness our tears.

Yes… That is why we are afraid to cry. Because when we are that real, we are that fragile. And the one(s) listening to us cry have a choice. They can either mock, despise, or punish us for our tears. OR they can respect our need to open up and drive out what should not remain – the flushing of the impure or the painful from the eyes, the heart, the soul.

If you need to cry today, find a space in which to do it, whether alone or with others. And if you find yourself near a crying person today, recognize the power you hold in how you choose to respond: the power to crush and harm or the power to nurture health and healing.

In the comments, I invite you to share your thoughts about tears.

There is power in repetition. How many times have we used it to remember facts for an exam or temporarily recall some important piece of information when we can’t find a pen to write it down? How often have we been uplifted by hearing a compliment more than once on the same day or been torn down by hearing another’s criticisms several times in a row?

It’s amazing how often our thoughts can circle around to the same thing or follow similar patterns. At the risk of overly simplifying things, I suggest that our brains often get stuck in negative repetitive ways of thinking – patterns we must actively work to break or derail. And the best way to do that is to replace the negative with the positive. For we will think – and we will often think repetitively. So let’s repeat the good stuff.

Several years ago, I was plagued by a great deal of worry. At best, it was distracting. At worst, on some days, it was almost debilitating. I wanted to bring an end to the cycle. So I started a worry notebook. I carried around a small notebook with me, and every time I found myself worrying about something, I wrote it down in my notebook and said, “God, I give it to You. It is no longer inside of me, no longer has a place in my mind.” Then I would look back over the list from time to time and see all the things I used to worry about that had slowly become unimportant or less troublesome in my thought life.

But to paraphrase a famous teaching of Jesus, it’s not enough to clean out the house and leave it empty; after cleaning out the bad, we must infuse the good.

A couple of years ago, my dad introduced our family to the idea of a “blessing box”. He gave each of us a small wooden box and slips of brightly colored paper. Then he encouraged us to develop a new habit of gratitude. Every time we encountered a blessing in daily life, he suggested we write the date and a summary of the blessing on a slip of paper before adding it to the box.

I’ve given up keeping a worry notebook – though there are days when I think taking up that habit would be useful again. But the blessing boxes at home and at work: those have been filling up steadily. I need to keep using them until they are full and I have to start new boxes or buy bigger boxes. In this way, I will use repetitive thoughts focused on the positive in a way that gives life.

Let this be a motto for each of us day by day: May the input I give myself and others repeat what’s good and true, what’s blessed.