Hey friends,
it’s Scott, sitting here in an old office chair, it’s an old faux-leather thing that smells faintly of wood polish and long days or burning the candle at both ends. Outside of my window, there’s an old maple that’s bleeding out its last furious red, each leaf a small, slow-motion fire spiraling down to the ground like it’s trying to write something on the earth before it dies.
I can’t stop thinking about that upper room (John 20). The air was thick with terror and unshed tears. They too had probably been burning their candles at both ends. The disciples are all bolted in that musty room, breathing shallow, convinced the story just ended in a splatter of blood and a borrowed tomb.
Then the impossible.
He’s there.
Not a ghost.
Not a metaphor.
Flesh.
Breath.
Heartbeat.
And the first word out of the mouth that once called Lazarus out of the dark is the same word He offers them now: Peace.
But watch (watch close), because He doesn’t hide the damage. He lifts the robe, turns those once-ruined hands palm-up, lets the ragged light fall straight through the holes. The resurrection body still carries the crucifixion. The wounds didn’t get airbrushed out in some cosmic Photoshop.
They glow.
And I’m wrecked by this:
Maybe glory isn’t the absence of the scar but the scar set on fire by love.
I have scars that still throb when the weather turns. (Anyone else have old soccer knees and battle scars like me?)
You do too.
Places we were torn open and never quite sewn back the same.
Rooms we keep locked.
Stories we rehearse in the dark like a verdict.
But the Risen One walks straight through those locked doors, breath warm and steady, and says,
“Look. Touch. These are the places the nails went in… and these are the places the world will know it was love that held me there.”
The wounded hands are the ones flipping fish over coals at dawn, feeding men who swore they never knew Him.
The pierced side is the doorway He keeps inviting Thomas to reach into (doubt and all).
So maybe resurrection isn’t erasure.
Maybe it’s the wound transfigured, still telling the truth about Friday while singing the louder song of Sunday.
Maybe the cracks are where the light is planning its jailbreak.
So today, friend, open the fists you’ve been clenching around the shards.
Let Him breathe into the fractures.
Let Him turn the scar into a window.
Because the leaves are falling like grace, and the tree looks dead, but I’ve seen what happens in spring to wood that remembers it was once a cross.
The wounds remain.
The love remains more.
Grace & Peace be with you.
Really.
-Scott
Pastor's Ponderings 