Scars. With my recent hip surgery, I now have eleven. I received my first scar at Warren G. Magnuson Park at Sand Point in Seattle. After coming home from working at Van De Kamps Dutch Bakery, with the July evening warm and sunny, I decided to ride my motorcycle out to the park. While rounding a corner at the park, I hit a patch of gravel, sending my bike sliding into one of the log booms chained together to keep people from riding onto the dunes. When my motorbike hit the log, it jettisoned me headfirst, arms outstretched superman-style. Even though I was wearing a helmet, I landed facedown on my chin. I have little memory of the ride leading up to the accident, and no memory of the accident or thereafter.

The nurse at the hospital told me that an elderly couple found me, managing to get me blood-covered into their car, while also arranging for someone from my fraternity to come and pick up my bike. I have no idea how they even knew I was in a frat, much less how they were able to get my keys to my friends so they could ride my damaged motorcycle home. At the hospital, the elderly couple dropped me off in the emergency room. When the admission nurse came out for a full interview, they were gone. I awoke the next morning at the University of Washington Hospital with a broken right wrist and a broken left shoulder blade. I also had a laceration on my chin just below my lip, which the doctors had stitched up the night before. Because of a severe concussion, I couldn’t remember anything for more than a few minutes. After several times of calling the nurse to inquire what happened, she finally wrote down on a torn scrap of blue paper: “1. You have a broken right arm and a broken left shoulder blade. 2. Your friends know you are here. 3. Your motorcycle is okay and back at the fraternity.” The accident left me with a scar in the middle of my chin; you now know why I wear a beard.

Thirty-five years later, I sustained my second scar when I had an umbilical hernia repaired in 2015. Thankfully, I am not one to show off my scars! My next seven scars came all at once when I had my prostate removed robotically on October 10th, 2018. Then early this last Autumn, I had another hernia, which I had repaired on November 27th. During the surgery, my surgeon found two hernias. Both were incisional hernias arising from my first hernia repair and my prostatectomy. On January 19th of this year, I had a full hip replacement at Swedish Orthopedic Institute in Seattle, which left me with a five-inch scar on my right hip. As a result of my bike accident and surgeries, I now have eleven scars.

When I was new to the church I serve, during one of our Communion Sunday sharing times, a young boy stood and asked, “Do you think that the healing of a wound can hurt worse than the wound itself?” He was neither speaking of a physical wound nor the healing that happens when a wound scabs over. His question was profound. While some of us carry scars on the outside, many of us carry wounds on the inside. Sometimes, we sustain injuries of the heart from other people, even from those whom we most love; other times, we create wounds ourselves through our poor judgments and choices.

Losing my mother to breast cancer over three years—from twelve to fifteen years old—left a gaping wound in my heart that I tried to bind up with drugs and alcohol. Even after being delivered from my addictions eight years after my mother’s death, it took me another two years to give up being a miser of grief. The healing didn’t come instantaneously and seemed to hurt almost as much as the wound itself.

I took several decades to find restoration from the injury left by a physically and verbally abusive father; I was thirty-six years old, and seven years into my ministry, before I forgave Dad for the harm he had caused. Granting forgiveness brought not only a healed heart but also a renewed peace.

I didn’t find healing from the cruel bullying I received in elementary school for forty-five years. I had allowed the wounds to fester into resentment, bitterness, and distrust. I am still forgiving, releasing them from any demand that they should receive retribution.

I have more than just eleven scars. I have the scars left from the wounding of my heart. Sometimes, the healing of the wounds has hurt more than the injuries themselves. Heart wounds and the scars they leave are invisible to the eye, yet a discerning eye and ear can see and hear them. Some of us may have escaped without any external scars, but all of us have internal scars and sometimes unhealed wounds of the heart. When I look at one of my physical scars, it reminds me of how I sustained the wound and how it healed—but now with little or no pain.

After God had given me a group of people to listen to my hoarded grief arising from Mamma’s death, over the coming years, the sorrow and pain subsided until I thought it completely gone. But with my diagnosis of stage four cancer, the old wound has been reopened. I find myself in some of the same places in which Mamma found herself, giving me insight into what she had felt and thought. And I find myself grieving for her and myself and my wife and daughters.

When I was going through my thirty-nine radiation treatments, one of those caring for me at the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance in Poulsbo gave me a homework assignment. He asked me to write him a paper on the three primary meanings of the stigmata. I am embarrassed to admit that I didn’t know what the stigmata were. After checking that fountain-of-all-knowledge Wikipedia, I discovered that they are the wounds of Christ sustained in his crucifixion. I wrote a three-page, single-spaced essay on what I saw as the three primary meanings of the stigmata. First, the scars of Jesus declare his resolute and unswerving love for all of us. Second, his scars proclaim the Sacrifice of sacrifices through which Jesus forgave us all our sins. Third, his scars shout out that Jesus is alive, revealing that he is the Resurrection and the Life! When I doubt that I am loved, I look to Jesus’ wounded hands, who loved me so much that he gave up his very life that I might live. When I agonize over whether I am forgiven, his scars remind me of the once and for all Sacrifice, which achieved a complete pardon. And when I feel alone with this cancer, I find his scarred hands enveloping me, he who once was dead now alive, gripping my life.

In looking back, all my wounds have been healed by Jesus. He has never left me nor deserted me; I will be with him forever. And the scars left remind me of his healing love, that just as he has forgiven me everything, I can forgive those who have injured me. I am reminded that there yet remains a resurrection through which he’ll bring me to a life without any wounds. Maybe I will still have my scars, but what will certainly remain is his undying, boundless love, the once-and-for-all forgiveness wrought on the cross, and the never-ending LIFE in whom and by whom we will live—all of which are seen in his scars.