healing.

The other day I watched as a friend pulled a scab off of a scrape on her leg.  It's a pretty common thing, I think, to pick off our scabs.  An impulse, you could say.  Like biting one's nails, tapping a foot, or twirling hair, it's natural, instinctual.  Yet to pick off a scab is to restart the healing process.

We have this tendency to reopen our wounds.  We begin to heal, and then force ourselves to deal with it over and over again.  Trauma tells us to repeatedly process, to keep things in our memory to let them come back up over and over again.  Scabs are hard and red and visible, so we pick them off because they are ugly.  But the healing process must be ugly so that the end result is full restoration.

We are a broken people, pulling off the very thing that heals us.  When we don't rely on God to bring newness, or we reject the way that He does it, we make bigger issues for ourselves.  Incessantly picking off scabs develop scars that never go away.  We all have them, we all make new ones.  But how different would our lives look if we were to trust that God would heal us?  How different would our perspectives be if we allowed our wounds to heal fully instead of making them bleed again?

Oh, to trust Him more..