Longing to be unwounded, and being healed instead
Stitching up a beloved stuffy
Every time I see Psalm 77 approaching in the psalter, my heart catches. It’s been nearly two years since our last miscarriage, and God has brought so much healing in that time, but this passage that put words to my wrestling in those days still feels so tender to read.
I remember one particular day about a month after our second pregnancy loss, my fifth pregnancy. In those days, I clung to Scripture like a lifeline keeping me tethered to what I knew in my head was true about suffering and God’s goodness, while my heart kicked furiously under the surface, struggling to keep pace with all that good theodicy in my brain. I was weary and grieving.
I glanced at the lectionary, and turned to that day’s reading: Psalm 77. I read aloud, tears coursing down my cheeks as my own heart echoed the the psalmist. I continued on steadily and sincerely, until I got to verse 9:
“Has God forgotten to be gracious? Has he in anger shut up his compassion?”
My voice faltered and cracked. I had finally, inadvertently voiced the singular fear that lurked underneath all this grief, the question that had been threatening to unravel all the truths I had been repeating in my head to stay afloat.
I tried to press on to the next verse of the psalm, the answer to the psalmist’s anguished questions: “I will appeal to this, to the years of the right hand of the Most High…” but I couldn’t make myself say it. My heart resounded with the question that I could no longer escape: “Has God forgotten to be gracious?”
A dear friend who has walked faithfully through many seasons of suffering once told me about an exercise she did when she was deeply grieving the loss of her father. She turned to Paul’s well-known words in 2 Corinthians 4. She wrote at the top of a page the first half of v. 8, “We are afflicted in every way,” then at the very bottom of the same page wrote the second half of the verse, “but not crushed.” She did the same with the next stanzas, writing “perplexed” in the top margin, and “but not driven to despair” at the bottom; then again with “persecuted” and “not forsaken;” and finally, “struck down” and “not destroyed.”
She said that before experiencing suffering in her own life, she didn’t know that there was a necessary and natural gap between bearing the weight of our affliction and our ability to say, “Yet I was not crushed.” Between saying, “I could not stand another second,” and “It did not destroy me.” Between saying, “This pain is unrelenting,” and “I was never—not once—forsaken.”
She told me, “I realized there was a journey for Paul between saying that he was ‘struck down,’ and saying that he was ‘not destroyed.’ God’s grace is in that gap. His healing comes to us there. Yet we’ve convinced ourselves that we honor God best by making that gap as small as possible. Or denying that it’s there in the first place.”
I had been trying to shrink that gap with a strong theology of suffering, piling up reasons to muscle through to “considering it all joy,” when the One who stands in solidarity with sufferers wanted instead to enter into that gap, animating my good and true theodicy, touch my broken heart, and bind up my wounds. But I just wanted to accumulate truths hoping that they would somehow add up, not to being healed, but to being unwounded.
When I finally had to face the question I was afraid to ask, “Has God forgotten to be gracious?”, he offered me his own wounded self as a response.
As Jesus’s resurrected and ascended body reveals, we cannot go back to being unwounded. After all, it is nail-scarred hands that will reach for mine, a gashed side that I will be drawn to when he brings me into the fullness of his presence at last.
But on some days, to be honest, I still find myself longing for unwoundedness. My mind stands in anxious vigilance, strategizing, trying to head off at the pass my worst fears, those unthinkable sufferings. Yet in these moments of fear, the Spirit reminds me that just as Jesus is fully, self-givingly present to me in the midst of my right-now anxiety, binding up the wounds that fighting for security on my own terms has wrought, it is that same healing presence of Jesus, his wounded hands on my bruised heart, that will sustain me in every grief and season of suffering. He stands in the agony of the gap between being struck down, and marveling that I was not actually destroyed as I had feared, between questioning if God has forgotten to be gracious, and shouting in triumph and praise, “Your way, O God, is holy. What god is great like our God?” (Ps. 77)
Our wounds will not disappear, but they will be made new. The hands of our Healer are transforming our wounds into marks of love, a sign that we belong to Christ, a way to join our stories to the testimonies of the wounded saints throughout the ages that though we were brokenhearted, afflicted, struck down, we have also been bound up, healed, loved, and never—not once—forsaken.