Lorrie Spinney

Category: The Dance (Life)

  • Unfixed Wounds

    Some wounds heal completely. It takes a while, but eventually they are gone: no scars.

    Others don’t.

    Instead, we learn how to live with them. We cover scars with makeup or clothing, or we wear them dismissively. We learn to walk with a limp, or bent, or maybe we go on wheels. But we go.

    And sometimes God does wonderful healings, miraculous healings. And sometimes he doesn’t.

    And I am thinking that all this is true of mental and emotional wounds just as much as of physical ones.

    My dad drank, making life sometimes chaotic and scary.  I learned that the world is not a safe place. He touched me sexually and I learned that I was, in some essential way, bad.

    Fear and guilt: two wounds that happened early and went deep.

    I still have them, and I am over 50 years old. God has not taken them away though I have wanted him to. I would love to not so easily, or often, fall into those feelings. A good Christian shouldn’t.

    But maybe that’s wrong thinking.

    Every time I feel guilt, it is an invitation to wash in forgiveness. Maybe the guilt is earned, or maybe it’s the hurt of the old wound, but so what? I get me to the cross and I stay there a while, letting what Jesus did – be for me.

    And fear, well, it’s the prerequisite for courage. If I feel fear a hundred times a day, then a hundred times a day I get to be brave. That’s a lot of bravery training.

    Guilt teaches me forgiveness and fear teaches me courage, like a mountain in my way teaches me to climb.

    Like God left enemies in Canaan “only to teach warfare” to the Isrealites who needed it (Judges 3:2).

    Maybe God leaves some wounds unfixed so that He can keep giving us fresh grace. Maybe we need to stop resisting and instead climb, letting our need drive us up the next step.

    Over and over and over.

    Since my weakness is the soil in which God’s strength grows, why would he take it away? Does a farmer take the dirt off a field?

  • Christmas in ordinary life

    He started out as a baby

    without self-awareness –

    the great I AM –

    and needing to put the pieces together

    as he grew; to figure out his purpose

    and learn about his father.

    He needed to learn a skill and trade

    among his family – brothers, dad.

    He began each day with no awareness

    of what that day would bring, or where

    it would take him.

    He needed to learn how to surrender

    his human will to the will of God,

    and then

    how to keep doing it day after day

    in the context of an ordinary life –

    a tradesman in a nowhere town

    during tense political times.

    He needed to learn

    to see God

    with human eyes

    and live for God, with God

    in a human life.

    The Jesus we saw at the end –

    His few short years of publicity

    and long hours of pain on a cross –

    was the final result. He learned

    how to live God’s life

    as a human.

    Which is what we need to learn;

    and at Christmas, when we try to remember

    a long ago event in a faraway place,

    and to somehow piece it together

    with our ordinary lives, so that it means

    what we know it should mean,

    we can remind ourselves

    that he did learn,

    that he knows how to learn,

    and how to teach us.

    And that although for us

    it is long ago and far away,

    it is not for him.

    To God, whose thoughts are never dimmed by time,

    the experience of being human

    is fresh, and utterly now.

    He is still learning,

    as a master learns,

    for and with each one of us,

    how to live his life

    in ours.