He Kept The Marks

The door is open to the street because it is that kind of afternoon, and the light comes right across the floor and hits the far wall.

Four of them around the table and the food is out and nobody is being formal about it.

Somebody says the thing everybody says, which is: photo. And there is the usual noise, and chairs get moved, and a phone goes on a shelf against a jar.

Forty-four years old.

And she does the thing. She does it in about a second and a half and nobody in that room has ever noticed her do it. Left side back. Right arm across. Chin a little down and turned. Sleeve pulled with the thumb. Eleven years of practice and it is now a reflex, not a decision.

The photograph is lovely. Everybody looks happy because everybody is happy.

Later, on her own, she looks at it and does what she always does, which is check. And it is fine. You cannot see anything.

And underneath the checking, underneath eleven years of it, there is a hope she has never said out loud to a single person, and it is this: that whatever God does at the end, He will take all of it away. Not just heal it. Erase it. Make it as though the whole thing never happened, so that there is no evidence anywhere of what she has been through, including on her.

If you have an angle you stand at, you know how fast it has become, and you know that hope, and you know you have never said either of them.

He came back and He still had them

Weigh it first and at its own size, because on this site the honest paragraph comes before the good one and it does not get hurried.

What this costs is not the photographs. It is the second and a half. It costs you a reflex that runs in every room you enter, which is a kind of low tax on being anywhere. It costs eleven years of checking afterward. It costs the swimming and the short sleeves and the particular summer clothes other people do not think about. And it costs you a hope so private you have never said it, which is the hope of being made into somebody with no evidence on her.

I am not calling that small and I am not putting it beside anybody else's, because on this site there is no ranking of what people carry and there never will be. Any word from God that needs your eleven years made lighter first is not one Scripture speaks and not one the Holy Spirit has ever carried.

And plainly, before anything else: if the checking has gone somewhere darker, as far as thinking the people at that table would have easier afternoons without the whole arrangement of you, tell one living person today. Your doctor, one of the three at the table, or a crisis line where you live, 988 by call or text in the United States and its equivalent wherever you are. Scripture asks nobody to hold that alone, and the Holy Spirit has always moved through people who leave the door open to the street.

Now, Luke 24, and this is the scene I want in your hands.

He is risen. It is the first evening. He comes and stands in a room of people who are terrified and think they are seeing a spirit.

Behold my hands and my feet, that it is I myself: handle me, and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have. And when he had thus spoken, he shewed them his hands and his feet.Luke 24:39-40

He shewed them his hands and his feet.

Sit with what that means. That body had been through everything a body can be put through, and it had been raised, and the raising was complete, and it still had the marks in it.

He could have come back without them. There is no possible objection to that. If resurrection means anything it certainly means He could have arrived unmarked, and nobody would have questioned it, and the whole of church history would have said of course.

He did not. He kept them, and He led with them, and He used them as the proof of who He was.

You are looking at a risen body that carried its marks on purpose. Luke 24:40 says He showed them His hands and His feet, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a first evening in a locked room and lays it on a table in the afternoon light.

Now, why He kept them, as far as we are told. Because they were how they knew Him. The marks were not damage that had survived the resurrection by accident. They were the identifying evidence of a person, offered by that person, in the moment He most needed to be recognized.

You have a history in your body that the risen Christ treated as identity rather than as an embarrassment. That is written into Luke 24:39, and His Spirit in you is the one who lets a woman read that as being about her rather than only about Him.

Now let me be exact about what this does not say, because eleven years of good sentences have already been said in that room.

It does not tell you what your body will be like. It is not a promise that your scars stay and it is not a promise that they go, and anybody who is confident about that is going beyond the text. What God does there is His, in His own way, and I will not guess in a warm voice.

And it does not tell you to stop standing at your angle. That reflex was built for good reasons over eleven years, and this site is not going to hand you a new task on top of everything else you carry.

What it does is take one thing off the table. The hope you have never said, that everything will be erased, is not the picture Scripture gives. What Scripture gives is a body that went through the worst thing that has ever happened to a body, was raised entirely, and had a history in it that its owner held up in a room and said: look, it is me.

You were never promised deletion, and what you got instead was a person who kept His. Scripture says He showed them His hands and His feet, and the same Spirit who raised Him is the one who makes that a comfort rather than a curiosity.