HEALING WITHOUT SHAME
Just to the left of my computer sits a small translucent pouch - paper lines the back, a clear blue plastic covers the front. Inside are three screws, the longest nearing three inches, the shortest just under two. They look like they would be used to secure the boards of a deck.
A surgeon just removed them from my son’s leg.
Following a rare fracture of his tibial tuberosity, these screws were my son’s only way forward from injury, carefully inserted by a surgeon to secure the bone while his body found time to heal.
It would be tragic if my son looked at those screws and felt shame, discouraged by the belief that he should have been able to get better on his own. It would be even more heart-breaking if he had refused the screws in the first place, convinced he should be strong enough to pull himself together without help.
The physical body often removes some of our ‘choice’ when it comes to seeking help. Pain is incredibly motivating and we have deemed it socially acceptable to search out medical ways of curing our brokenness when the body betrays.
But what about the mind?
What about the heart?
What about the emotions?
How many times do we look at our need for help in these areas with such shame and embarrassment? How many times do we refuse to even seek out the very thing that could knit us back together?
The mind and the heart are magnificent and confusing. Fractures here are more of a winding path than a straight-forward plan, but healing is possible none the less, if we are willing to allow help.
Could we give ourselves the grace to seek healing for ALL the parts of us?
The brave ones do. But even they wonder at the perceptions of others, at the accusations of weakness they wrestle with inside their own mind. We’ve created a divide between the parts of the body that can accept help and those that cannot, and we pay the price as a result.
Those screws spent just under a year inside my son’s bone - a heartbeat in the scope of a life, a temporary span of time that would not stretch on into forever. Soon the screws will fade into a distant memory, a part of his story but not a dictating force in his future. He will be returned to health with the pain of past injury left behind.
He will move on. Because he allowed help.
Will we do the same?