Old Scars

I think I've been spending the last three and a half years growing around a scar shaped like Open Door Community Church's absence.

At last, perhaps, the hurt has been fully absorbed.

It's funny. You don't really notice when pain is finally gone. When you live with it for a long enough period of time it becomes something like a shadow that follows you - bothersome at first, just another quirk of life after awhile. Then, one day, you look for your old companion and you realize that ever-aching tender place is nowhere to be found. You poke around, trying to find the hurt and all you find is a healed up scar and the realization that you are so much more than the sum of all your sorrows.

When the article appeared in the Courier a couple of weeks ago about the church, my cell phone rang off the hook and I got a ton of emails from people who felt betrayed and hurt all over again. My heart understood their pain, but here's the only advice I could find – let the scar tissue grow.

Perhaps, in the end, pain is nothing more than another form of baptism – when you arrive on the other side you have been transformed, regenerated and are ready to live again.