spackle and scars

While I have already moved to Orlando, my parents and I are still waiting for the house in Jupiter to sell. I went there today to get some more things to bring to my apartment and to make sure it
was orderly and clean.

A side note to mention – which is still relevant – is that like many women, I have way too many clothes, shoes, and purses. While my closets equal about the same size as my closet in the old house, I don’t have as much drawer and organized space as I did before. So… I decided I could take the metal closet organization “things” from the old house to bring to my new apartment. I proceeded today to use my handy-man skills (I do have some – just not enough, apparently) to take the metal shelving things off the wall in the closet. It took me forever to unscrew all the screws out of the wall – they each had to be at least 3-4 inches long. After a couple of them, I started to hear things drop “inside” the wall. I realized soon after getting the screws out of the wall that there were now 8 1/4-inch holes in the wall from the anchors that WERE holding the screws. Those anchors were now in the bottom of the wall – no way I am ever getting those back.

Back to the holes. 8 of them. There was no way I could put the thing back on the wall – the solution was to find the spackle in the garage and fill the holes. I have never completed such a task but I was confident in my ability to make it work. Okay, so you remember the length of the screws, right? That means these holes went DEEP. I went through a good amount of spackle for such small holes (at least in my opinion) and it took a good amount of time – around an hour.

The spackle just kept going deeper into the holes and failing to make them look filled – so I stood there feeling idiotic and defeated. This was the kind of moment that usually gets me thinking… these kind of moments are the ones that I realize there is nothing I can do to take whatever mistake I made back and should take the chance to figure out what lesson God could be using this instance to teach me.

So here is what I gathered in my mind as I stood filling and filling and trying to make it look as neat as possible…

I thought of how often I had done just what I was doing to the holes in my life. I realized how often I have I tried to fill the gaps (whether I made those holes or not) in my life with whatever I could find. I have so many times then tried to smooth over those filled holes as best I could – trying to make it appear as if there were no holes at all.

However, just like the wall at the house ended up looking – it looks okay, but if you look close enough you can tell that there are, in fact, filled holes… HOLES, YES THERE ARE HOLES. Even with filler, the fact remains that are holes.

I thought about how my being saved by Christ and made into a new creation affected those holes in my life. My question was the “logistics” of the holes – has Christ filled the holes or has He made it as if the holes never existed?

As I stood there twist after twist while I unscrewed everything and thinking about the “logistics”, the scars on my arms happened to catch my attention. Now, I have many different scars from over the years – some cuts and some burns. A correlation between the holes and scars emerged (I connect everything, what can I say… I am a woman – think “plate of spaghetti”).

I came to the conclusion that just as my scars remain, so do the holes in my life – here is the key… After Christ was resurrected from the dead, his scars and holes remained. Remember the disciples touching the open wounds in His hands? Those holes stood to show Him as the Wounded Healer. My healed scars and filled holes remind me of what Christ has done in my life – In my broken and wounded soul, Christ has healed me and made me whole.