The doctor looked at me with concern in her eyes.

My heart skipped. “What’s wrong? Is the infection not clearing up? Is it not healing?”

“Well, there’s still signs of an infection,” she admitted. “But what I’m really worried about is that you won’t heal quickly.” She cringed.

“Which means…” I coaxed.

“Which means you could have a scar.”

I exhaled and smiled a little. “I don’t care if I have a scar. I just want it to heal!”

It is healing. And I will indeed have a scar. The doc confirmed it during my recent follow-up visit.

Another of my few visible physical scars. And one more among dozens that the experiences of life have left on my mind, heart, and soul.

I’ve recently finished polishing the manuscript for my first novel – a piece with the working title of The Voice of Melody. The story incorporates several themes; a major one is the question of suffering and dealing with life circumstances that could either render us crippled, powerless – or refine us for some greater purpose and later empower us with a greater strength. At one point, a father counsels his daughter on that topic, and the wisdom he passes on to her sustains her through several subsequent trials.

In essence, he says that scars are left behind for us to remember what we’ve gone though so we can live as grateful people: grateful for death or greater pain we have been spared, and grateful for any mercy we have been shown.

If we never went through the difficult things, we wouldn’t know the meaning of gratitude because we wouldn’t recognize our need to be grateful. To paraphrase my colleague, Tony, it is those scars (hard times) that can make us thankful for all the goodness in life.

I will have a scar on my head. And every time I feel it, I can remember how God helped the doctor to catch the cyst before it became too threatening, how He helped her to remove all the tissue to spare me from greater trouble.

And I can be thankful that I am alive today, alive to give and to bless.

In a week when many Americans will pause to count their blessings, let us count all of them. The obvious. The commonplace. The miraculous. And the scar-laced.

What is it about my air-brushed, age-defying home culture that so dislikes reminders of the dirty, disgusting, and painful?

A student recently asked why most American bathrooms don’t have a floor drain (outside of the shower/bathtub) – a feature that is prevalent in many countries where indoor plumbing is widely used. I thought about it for awhile and finally concluded that one of the main reasons is because a floor drain can be both an eyesore and a source of smelliness. Both of these remind us of the dirt and germs so many of us are crazy about avoiding.

And apart from my vegan and vegetarian friends, what right-minded American doesn’t love a good hunk of meat? Yet, if we once again compare the American diet (and local supermarket) with that of most other cultures around the world, we find something interesting. We don’t like our “animals” to look like animals. Apart from the bones in hot wings, KFC meals, and barbecued ribs, there’s not a thing left behind in most of our meat choices to remind us that it was an animal. And even those exceptions are usually covered in so much breading or sauce we won’t think about how it was part of a living being a short time before. No yummy fish heads in our soup, no chickens’ feet to nibble along with the rest of our dinner. Some would say it’s simply a matter of convenience. It’s so much easier, after all, to cook and eat a boneless breast than to deal with a whole chicken. But I would argue that we also don’t want to think about the disgusting nature of the butchering process and what that animal went through so that we might be nourished.

A new ad popped up while I was watching TV last night. It urged every viewer to ask “What pain?” – to keep playing and pushing and moving no matter what. Have pain? No worries! Take this pill and your pain will roll back so you can perform as hard as ever! Like eating around the bones, pain slows me down and makes life feel messy. And why in the world would I want that?

I’ll tell you two reasons why.

Pain tells us where we are in the healing process. I’m continuing to heal from a procedure performed under my scalp. At various stages of my recovery, I’ve experienced different levels and types of pain. I took a bit of Tylenol in the beginning to help with the worst of it, but since then I’ve done nothing to mask the pain. It is my body’s way of telling me what’s going on – especially when I can’t see the wound. Likewise, when someone or something hurts my heart, how sensitive my heart remains towards that person or topic serves as a litmus test for how well my heart wound is healing.

Pain reminds us that we cannot go it alone – and we were not designed to. Some people do their best to deaden or ignore their pain (physical and/or emotional) so they can appear strong before others – or be strong for others. But the bittersweet beauty of pain is that it can and should drive each person into the strength that only God and community can provide. It gives us the perfect excuse for living humble lives – and opportunities for us to seek reasons to be thankful either after or in the midst of the discomfort.

I invite your comments on the place of physical/emotional pain in our lives and will address this topic further in next week’s post.