Wednesday, October 24, 2012

The Walking Wounded


There are so many of us walking wounded these days - perhaps all days - some with wounds writ large on the face of history - some the harder-to-see wounds real nonetheless.

What prescription do we seek?  What cure can we find?

Medicating of self?  One more drink - one more pill?  It works - until it doesn’t.

Examining and reexamining with friends and strangers what went wrong and why?  Hard to know when we slip from needful reflection to needless self-infliction, reliving the pain over and over again.

Blaming God or the cosmos at the injustice of our peculiar suffering?  As if suffering were ever a matter of justice.  Suffering, after all, is different than pain.  The pain of the moment may be unjust.  But the rental space in my head that is suffering, the afterburn of pain, isn’t about justice, it’s about health and wellness – or its lack.

These are the things I think about today as I consider so many among us who are the walking wounded.  I wonder and hope and pray that my noticing, all our noticing, matters.  I know that our not knowing does – its own form of wound – as the one barely able to put one foot in front of the other must wonder what they have to do to get a busy world just to notice.

God notices.  This I know.  Deep down.  In the place I have no other name for and so call my ‘knower’.  Deep down in my knower, I know God notices.  That carries me.  But some days, to borrow from a quote I heard a long time ago, I just need skin.  Some days, so do you.  On those days, I am hoping and praying that I offer you the face of God and that you offer the same face back to me.

Come, let us walk together.

No need to talk.

Just look at me and see my wounds and know you do not travel alone.

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