Scars amaze me, primarily because they always have stories associated with them and I’m a story junkie. But the biologist in me is also fascinated with the process of gaining a scar. The concept is simple enough: cause heavy trauma to a bit of tissue, the body responds, and that tissue is altered forever. It’s the same basic process that we’ve taken advantage of for tattoos. A gun rapidly traumatizes the skin and simultaneously deposits a bit of ink. Just like that, every skin cell that grows in that spot grows with an extra pigment. Forever.

I find that our hearts¹ are similar. Should one manage to suffer a serious tragedy, those traumatic events change a person. The magnitude of that change is directly proportional to the magnitude of the trauma. Some are minor events, like the time my guitar was stolen in Mexico; they leave a mark, teach you a few lessons, but they don’t generally impede or redirect the direction of your life. But sometimes we suffer major trauma – events that have the potential to shake and even destroy our faith forever. An instructor recently told my class that, in his opinion, those major trauma events only normally occur two or three times in a person’s life.

I really, really want to believe he’s right.

January 9, 2008, I literally moved 1000 miles from home, to Kansas City, Missouri to enroll in a small, non-accredited Bible school called the Forerunner School of Ministry. When I boarded the plane in El Paso, Texas, I was pretty convinced that I’d lost my mind. I made the decision to move so quickly I hadn’t had enough time to even line up a place to live. To this day, it was the craziest thing I’ve ever done, but I knew the Lord had told me to go. So I went.

If I had known then what the next three-and-a-half years had in store for me, I doubt I would have ever boarded that plane. Six months after I moved, my mother passed away unexpectedly. She was alright one day; the next, she never woke up. I’ll never forget the sheer terror in my father’s voice when he called me that night. I’d never heard that kind of panic in that man’s voice before and I hope to never hear it again. That was the absolute worst summer of my life.²

The death of a parent is enough to jar anyone’s faith, but my story doesn’t stop there. Exactly eight months after my mother passed away (which was also my 24th birthday), my older brother Robert discovered a small lump on his testicle. Within two weeks, he was in the hospital, being treated for the mother of all aggressive cases of testicular cancer.³ Not to sound self-centered, but that was the worst birthday present ever. And it was the beginning of Robert’s 15-month, heroic battle with cancer. Call it the gift that kept on sucking.

I spent those 15 months praying with all the faith I had. I did my best to rally as many of my friends and family to pray for Robert as I could. The full story is long and painful, but I will say that my brother fought for his life like Rocky Balboa and John McClane combined. Unfortunately, he passed away May 29, 2010.

The last few years of my life have been the traumatic equivalent of a full-body tattoo. I’m hoping that this whole painful story accounts for at least two of my three major trauma events, but who knows? My academic career here at FSM has been anything but enviable, but there’s one thing that I can say with certainty – I have changed.

When I got back to school in August, I was immediately confronted with a problem – I couldn’t pray. I was beginning my senior year at a school that prides itself on the fact that every student is required to spend 24 hours per week in prayer, and I couldn’t pray. For weeks, I went to the prayer room, stood in the back, and let hundred of students pray around me while I fought to both stay in the room and to not slap the most zealous of those students in the face. My heart was one giant open wound and I did not handle it well.

One night, a friend of mine walked up to me and rebuked me. She was incredibly gracious, but her words stung nonetheless. She said, “Joe, I’m not going to pretend that I know what you’re going through. I don’t. And honestly, I hope I never will. But I do know this: the only place where you’re going to find any healing or comfort is in Him. So  kick, scream, cry, or whine, but you have to start praying again. Otherwise you’re going to stand back here forever and become a useless lump on the wall.”

I thrive on confrontation, but even I can recognize when I’m completely beat. She was right and I couldn’t argue for a moment. But it didn’t change the fact that I didn’t know what to pray. So I took one step forward and took a cue from Psalm 62:8:

Trust in Him at all times, O people;

pour out your heart before Him;

God is a refuge for us.

I started praying the only words that I had in me, “Jesus, I’m in an incredible amount of pain. I’m weary and I’m confused. And I don’t know if I really trust You anymore. So if You really love me, I need You to prove it. If You’re really good, if You really care about me, if You really care about how I feel and how much pain I’m in, You’re going to have to show me.”

Now, that prayer sounds pretty stupid. What right do I have to ask the God of the universe for anything? For that matter, why should He answer at all?

Those questions are perfectly valid, but I couldn’t have cared about them any less at the time. That night, I was in too much pain to filter my prayers and say anything remotely “proper.” All I knew was that I hurt and I wanted it to stop.

Over the next few months, I discovered that my prayers were actually scriptural. In Isaiah 7:10, the Lord gives a wicked king a promise and backs that promise by actually commanding Ahaz to ask for a miraculous sign as proof of the word Isaiah delivered.

Again the Lord spoke to Ahaz, “Ask a sign of the Lord your God; let it be deep as Sheol or high as heaven.”

In Mark 9, Jesus meets a father and his demonized son. The father is clearly desperate for his son to be set free and finally breaks down and asks Jesus for help.

And he said, … “But if you can do anything, have compassion on us and help us.” And Jesus said to him, “If you can! All things are possible for one who believes.” Immediately the father of the child cried out and said, “I believe; help my unbelief!”

Do you know what happened next? One might think that the Lord would ignore the father because his faith wasn’t perfect; or at least, that’s what we would do in Jesus’ shoes. But His ways aren’t our ways, are they? No. Instead of walking away, Jesus immediately turns and casts the demon out of the boy.

Similarly, everybody in the church dogs Thomas. Doubting Thomas they call him. That title is completely unfair. We forget that it was Thomas in John 11 who showed the most courage among the apostles. There, Jesus announces that He’s going to Bethany to raise Lazarus from the grave, but the disciples don’t want to go because they’re afraid the Pharisees with kill them all. But who stood up in that moment? Thomas. And what did he say?

So Thomas, called the Twin, said to his fellow disciples, “Let us also go, that we might die with Him.”

 

Thomas loved Jesus enough to die with Him at Bethany. After losing my brother, I can say this with certainty: Thomas loved Jesus so deeply that upon Jesus’ death, his heart was shattered. It’s not easy to believe in anything after you take a blow like that. When the disciples (who, for the record, had already seen the risen Lord for themselves) come to Thomas and tell him the news, is it any wonder that Thomas should have such trouble believing? My vote is that we ditch that over-critical title and replace it for something else. How about Honest Thomas? Because that moment he made his famed request in John 20:25, he was being just that.

But he said to them, “Unless I see in His hands the mark of the nails, and place my finger into the mark of the nails, and place my hand into His side, I will never believe.”

We Christians are so silly. We want everything to be so cut and dry – either a person believes or he doesn’t. If it were up to us, Thomas would’ve been excommunicated on the spot. But how does Jesus respond? Did He deride and lambast Thomas for his lack of faith? No. When Thomas was too scared, too weak to believe, Jesus showed up in that upper room specifically for Thomas. Despite our heavy criticism, Jesus wasn’t reluctant to respond to Thomas’ pathetic plea. He walked through a wall, opened up His hands, and said, “Here I am, Thomas. I’ll do whatever it takes to prove to your heart that I’m real.”

My prayer that night was a bit unorthodox. I’ll freely admit that. But I have a few friends and family members mourning the loss of loved ones who might need the Lord to show up in their lives and prove that He really cares about them. Maybe you’ve suffered some sort of trauma too. Maybe it’s major, maybe it’s minor. It doesn’t really matter how big or bad the trauma was. If you need Him, you need Him.

Remember what David said in Psalm 34:18:

The Lord is near to the brokenhearted

and saves the crushed in spirit.

There are no conditions to that statement. If you’re hurting, the Lord is near you, whether you feel it or not.

Paul also wrote something of import in Romans 8:31-32:

What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare His own Son but gave Him up for us all, how will He not also with Him graciously give us all things?

The only other thing I can say is that He’s met me while I’ve been stuck and faithless. In all my pain, confusion, and unbelief, He showed up. He proved His love to me over and over again since that night, because He’s good. And He’s faithful to answer when His children cry out to Him.

I may carry these scars for the rest of my life, but I have a Savior who is bigger than all that trauma. To this day, He’s been faithful to clean each and every wound that I’ve carried, not because I’m anything special, but because He is exactly who He promised to be.

And that’s why I love Him, because He never gave up on me.

¹ Obviously, I’m speaking of the heart metaphorically.
² Before I’m ripped to shreds by my sister-in-law, that was also the summer that my younger brother got married. That wedding was awesome. The summer became awful later, but not by Megan’s doing.
³ OK. Testicular cancer is definitively a man’s disease. Maybe I should have said, “the father of all aggressive cases of testicular cancer.”