I recently read devoured Jonathan Martin’s new book, Prototype: What Happens When You Discover You’re More Like Jesus Than You Think? I highlighted what seemed like every other sentence. And I tried to stifle the ugly cry as I read it on a 15-hour bus ride with dozens of 5th graders and their parents. I seriously couldn’t put it down. I’m pretty sure he wrote the book just for me!
As I read the following paragraph from chapter 6, “Resurrection, I think the world momentarily stopped spinning:
I think most of what you need to know about how life with God works is probably wrapped up in the bittersweet taste of dreams. All that longing and aching for something beautiful that is just out of reach. Sometimes you can touch it and sometimes you can’t. Everything in you that longs for beauty and music comes alive in those dreams, and for a moment you are the you that once was, before wounds and scars and choices and consequences and disappointment took their toll. You can practically taste the innocence and wonder before you knew too much, saw too much, felt too much. By the time you grasp for it, you wake up to the world that has long since moved on. Not that the world as it is doesn’t have beauty of its own, but how could it compare to the life you had before your scars? For a moment, you thought you could go back, but there is no going back. People die, hopes and dreams die, and weeds grow where wonder once lived. These days, bicycles and trampolines aren’t time machines so much. What is done is done, what is lost is lost.
I read those words on Mother’s Day afternoon as the charter bus cruised through upstate Virginia as the sun was beginning to set over rolling hills. The beauty of creation outside my window was in direct contrast to the darkness raging inside me. Darkness because as I read I couldn’t pinpoint a time when I ever truly felt innocence. I can remember as young as age three feeling something was wrong with me.
As I finished that paragraph, I wrote. I wrote because I didn’t talk with my mother that day. {Prior to last week, I hadn’t talked with her since Christmas day.} So I wrote what I needed to say…because I needed to escape the wounds that were caving in on me.
Dreams, beauty, music, words…they’ve all been escapes for me. But I’m reaching a point where I can no longer escape. I’ve decided I need to go back…to look the wounds in the eye and uncover any innocence I might’ve once felt. It could be that in facing the wounds, I find that I was innocent all along. {How dare I hope for such?!}
Martin went on to present the hope of resurrection. I love what he wrote:
What if there really is a way back? Though we, like Jesus, will still have the scars we’ve picked up along the way, what if we could get up like He did? What if nothing that seems lost is really lost?
What if there really is resurrection in this life? What if God can bring back to life what we believe to be dead? What if our hopes can be our reality? What if I’m given the innocence I can’t remember ever having?
Is that the result of true healing?…the dead brought to life?
Relationships resurrected…
Innocence resurrected…
Dreams resurrected…
Maybe healing comes when when I relinquish my hold on the way things should’ve been or should be. I think I have to face the deaths and mourn them, but I’ll hold on to the hope that Jesus is weeping with me and preparing to call out, Come forth! Arise!
