TATTOO SCARS The latte I bought up in Michigan’s lake country yesterday morning was superb. The guy who made it was almost as memorable. I’m guessing he spends more hours at the gym each day than most of us do in a week. The sleeves were gone from his T-shirt, probably so he could get his arms through. Or more likely, he just likes the way people study his arms. His arms were not the main event, however. This guy was tattooed from jawbone to . . . well, I don’t know how far down. I couldn’t see behind the counter. How do you look someone in the eye when their skin is covered with snakes, swords, mermaids, and Harleys? His 22” middle-linebacker-shaped neck was crawling with painted lizards. Every time he spoke, a lizard twitched. I can’t say I’ve ever seriously contemplated body art. Not on my skin, at least. For one thing, how does one ever settle on a design that would have value and meaning thirty years from now equal to what it means today? We change. Our sensibilities shift. Speaking of which: I know a young man in my town that I see every couple of weeks. His wrist is permanently inked with his former girlfriend’s name -- Emily. Poor guy. Emily is history; the tattoo is not. Then there is this strange phenomenon called aging. Body art must contend with the inevitable movement of time. My latte friend is going to look pretty funny at 70. The Harley on his right bicep will be running out of gas by then. I expect the tires will be flat too. I have enough scars on my body to tell a hundred different stories. Who needs body art when the stories behind scars are so memorable? Some of these tales are sad; others funny. A few of my scars constitute the leftovers of stupidity. Where would we be without scars? They reveal past hurts, painful experiences, and often traumatic wounds of old. Do you know the name Lilly Jacob? She was the Holocaust-surviving woman who discovered the famous “Auschwitz Album” – the only surviving photographic evidence of the genocide that took place inside the concentration camp. In 1958, she happened to be the winning contestant on the television show “Queen For a Day.” Instead of choosing a new appliance or a vacation get-away, Lilly asked for $500 cash. Lilly’s desire was to use the prize money to pay a plastic surgeon to remove the number A10862 from her left forearm. Nazi personnel at Auschwitz had crudely inked the tattoo. Her special request of the physician was that he remove the tattoo without anesthesia, since it was originally applied in that fashion. This was her painful way of personally remembering that the wounds of the Holocaust can never be fully eradicated. Lilly was not a number; she knew herself to be Lilly Jacob, a child of God. She wanted that identity back. NPR recently featured the story of a young girl who, at age four, was diagnosed with a rare bone cancer in her spine. Now ten and recovering well, she remembers getting some fake tattoo pens while in the hospital. Her dad would draw on her skin. She had a major scar extending from her sternum down to her pelvic bone. Dad made that into the colorful stem of a flower. Her feeding tube port – what she called her second belly button – he turned into a butterfly. Creative body art on a kid’s cancer scars. Pretty neat, especially since dad and daughter together drew the lines with such love. For those of us who hitch our lives to that wagon of a life called Christian, and to a Jesus who appears fearless in the face of suffering, we’re not embarrassed by our scars. Nor are we traumatized by the wounds that created them. We simply find great comfort in identifying with a Lord who had permanent body art of his own – earthly wounds that morphed into heavenly scars, and that never disappeared from his resurrected skin. By those wounds or scars of Jesus, we know healing -- beautiful healing for our sometimes torn and tattooed lives. ________________________ Copyright © 2013 Peter W. Marty. All rights reserved. Any use of this material must be attributed to Peter W. Marty. To reproduce this material in published format, please contact Peter.
Posted on: Sun, 04 Aug 2013 03:16:19 +0000
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