You’re hurt worse than you think, I wanted to tell her when she didn’t respond to my text. When her silence was deafening the other day.

It’s like the Chinese lettering the doctor wrote on my husband’s knee before surgery. Or maybe it was an H and a P. Or a stick man. Who knows what that symbol meant.

We didn’t know Scott’s knee was that bad. The doctor expected a tear in the meniscus, not the damage he found. The damage he fixed. Because this doctor knew what he wrote on that knee. Knew what he was doing when he cut it open.

It’s been a long month. A long year, really. At least a year of knee pain for my husband. But really it’s been longer than that. Scott first hurt his knee over two decades ago in the Army.

The truth is, we walk with our wounds. For years, maybe most of our life, we are the walking wounded. Wounds become the shape of us.

I wanted to tell her this when I sent her that text: I get you. I’ve been wounded this way. Your burden is too heavy. Give it to Jesus. 

So I told her this: “Give it to Jesus.”

And then silence.

“I’m tough. My knee will get better.” Nearly twenty-four years ago my husband said this after hurting his knee in Ranger school. And years later, from time to time, he’d hurt that knee again, and silently suffer.

I don’t know how knees work. Do they completely heal, then get re-hurt?

Do our hearts do this? Hurt and heal? Hurt and heal? All our lives we hurt and heal?

I’m not an expert on knees or hearts, but I know this. Some wounds don’t heal. When my uncle took his life after a sunny, summer day with me, that wound never healed.

Not without Jesus.

At first the wound was like lightening. Fire from the sky that torched my heart in half. When people die it hurts. When people kill themselves, it’s lightening. Especially when you’re the one who might have saved them.

The devil is in the details. If only I had said… If only I’d done… If only… if only…

If only I had saved my uncle.

In a way you become like God. Your own little god. You take the power of life and death into your hands and it always ends in death. Because people can’t escape death without Jesus.

It becomes this cross you bear. This load you carry. This wound that defines you. You’ve lived through lightening. The lightening is in you now. Shining out of you like light.

But it isn’t really light. It’s darkness in you.

How dark is the darkness when you think it’s light?

It’s not really the wound that defines you. It’s pride that defines you. You are proud of your pain. And you don’t want to part with it because it came to you like lightening.

When I sat beside my uncle’s body on the lawn, I owned that. Until they came and took him away, he was mine. In death, his pain became mine.

For years this pain was mine. The lightening was in me. And it took more lightening to burn it away. Walking with others through their dark valleys. I didn’t choose these valleys. God kept putting me at the scene of suicides. What were the chances of this?

Like death was waiting for me to show up before having its dark way in the lives of people I loved.

I have had it with this! I wailed to God after that third suicide happened. I am not your suicide girl!  Find someone else for these dark valleys!

“You have chosen this valley,” I heard the Lord say.

“Please take it away,” I begged God. “It’s too heavy for me. I can’t carry this anymore.”

“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest,” Matthew 11:28.

The day I gave this wound to God was like yesterday when I sat with the surgeon after he repaired Scott’s knee. The surgeon used pictures he took with a scope to explain it to me. “Here’s the damage. And here’s what I’ve done to fix it. It will heal now.”

Most of the time, it’s pride that gets us. Not our wounds. Our pride. We’re walking around not even knowing how bad we’re hurt. In our pride, we want to carry our own burdens, own our own wounds. We can handle it. We don’t need Jesus.

In our human strength we say, Don’t take my wound away. My wound is hard-earned. This wound defines me now. Jesus can’t have my wound. It makes me who I am.

Don’t our wounds define us?

Think about it…

“My childhood sucked,” a friend confessed the other day. “I’m not sure I can really love. I’m just too broken for love.” This friend has several divorces under her belt. Tears filled my eyes. “Jesus can heal you,” I told her.

“I’m a train wreck when it comes to relationships,” a man shared with me recently. “I don’t know why I keep trying.” I looked him in the eye. “You keep trying because everyone longs for love.” “I’m too jaded for love,” he said. “Let Jesus heal you of this jadedness,” I pleaded.

I could tell you a hundred stories right now. Right off the top of my head. The truth is, most of us are worse off than we think. And it doesn’t have to be this way. We can give our wounds to Jesus. The Bible says, “By his wounds we are healed, ” Isaiah 53:5.

Do you believe this?

By Jesus’ wounds you are healed?

Lay down your pride. Lay down your unbelief. Lay down your fear.

Today.

Do it today.

Let Jesus cut you open.

Let the the Great Physician do his work.

Let Jesus heal you.

 

P.S. A friend at church today who works at the hospital shared with me that the lettering on Scott’s knee is the surgeon’s initials. I love this. The doctor marking his patient with his name. Taking ownership of that patient. That wound. That healing.