Strong at the Broken Places

Ken Heer will be guest preacher at Fall Creek this week. I always enjoy hearing Ken speak, partly because he was my first pastor other than my dad, when I was attending College Wesleyan Church in Marion, Ind.

Ken's theme is Strong in the Broken places based on Isa. 61:1-3.

Reading that text got me thinking of a passage from my book, Why Me? Straight Talk about Suffering, and I thought I'd share it with you.

It describes a time when I visited a photographer for a publicity shot, and she wanted to use my cane as a prop in the photo. I've used a cane off and on for years because of my arthritis, but I was always a bit embarrassed about it and certainly didn't want it shown in a photograph. Aren't photographers supposed to make you look better than you really are.

"I let her take the picture--finally.

"I sat on the chair, there in the photographer's studio, surrounded by lights, feeling as if the whole world were watching. I leaned forward a little, resting my hands on my cane, and stared down the lens of that camera as if inot the face of God.

"It flashed.

"The picture revealed a different me than the one beore, more sober, more plain, more honest--more real. I went home that night and stood before th mirror, alone, counting the scars on my body. Six surgeries on my legs have left them riddled with ugly red lines. How I have been ashamed of them. How I have hated them. How anxiously I have hidden them from view.

"No more.

"I have seen the scars on Jesus' body. I have learned that all real peple have scars. All survivors have scars. All heroes have scars. All who have lived and loved and bled and lost and failed and triumphed have scars. It's the plastic people who are perfect, the unreal peole, the aribrushed, digitally enhanced peole who can't survive outside the strange environment of a magazine page or movie frame. We who are missing a limb or walk with a limp or are married to an insulin needele or divorced or abused or hungry or hurt--we are real.

"So I embrace these scars, my stigmata, my marks of Christ. For just as he, through suffering, became like me, so I, by my pain, have become more like him. These scars have become my seminary course in Christlikeness. For by them I have learned to be honest with myself, honest with God, and totally dependent on him."

I'm looking forward to what Ken has for us this week.