Cocoons

Doctors have told some of the surviving victims of the Virginia Tech shootings that it is not good to remove all of the bullet fragments. Extracting them is either too dangerous or too painful; it’s better to just leave the shrapnel where it lies.

The fragments no longer pose any harm to their physical health. In time, their bodies will even form fibrous cocoons around the embedded metal, effectively sealing it off from the surrounding tissue. Healing will not mean removing what caused the wounds. It will mean allowing their bodies to physically repackage the wounds so that their hearts and minds can focus on healing from the equally devastating spiritual and psychological impact. For the rest of their days they will carry around the physical evidence, visible only to X-rays, of the most horrifying day of their lives. How that will affect them otherwise remains to be seen in other ways more visible.

Makes me wonder about the cocooned-off wounds others carry around, visible only to the Spirit’s vision. Wounds from early childhood, wounds of physical or sexual abuse or neglect, wounds caused by words spoken in anger or inflicted by a breach of sacred trust. Self-inflicted wounds of self-betrayal, too. How many people carry around deeply embedded wounds like that, cocooned off, that no one else can see?

“We don’t evaluate people by . . . how they look (2 Cor. 5:16, The Message),” Paul wrote. People filled with the Spirit take a Spirit’s viewpoint of people, knowing that buried deep within are wounds too deep for any human eye to see.

People sometimes act strangely, even in unkind, harmful or unloving ways. The Spirit’s compassion demands that we look deeper than only the behaviors human eyes can see to the deeply embedded cocoons of past horrors no one but Jesus can see.