HEALING SEASON
Last year on this day it snowed. Little white flakes blanketed the earth where the daffodils should be, and I remember how kindred the world was, to what was happening in me.
Outside it was simultaneously beautiful and bleak in its concert of swirling, dancing contradictions that ripped away any previous impression of what it is to be March. Inside, I wrapped my head in intricate scarves and rested.
That long, greedy winter would have been easy to dismiss as something arduous to “wait through” if not for the tiny signs of rebirth flowing through me like snowmelt.
Yesterday the results of my one-year CT scan read, “all clean.”
Healing is a covert process. Sometimes as invisible as March and its Spring.
I marvel that even when and particularly because injury takes its toll, the body moves into overdrive to regenerate damaged cells—
It seems humanity is designed to heal. Not once or instantaneously but again and again, and over unending spans of time.
Though life seems endlessly destructive over agonizing spans of time,
Healing is as intertwined and omnipresent as breath.
There is no interruption or suspension,
it simply happens. It emphatically insists.
Healing isn’t something we wait for until all the hard is over.
It is what makes the hard bearable.
It is certain our hearts and bodies will become wounded over and over.
That’s what life is. A series of abrasions. A perpetual falling down.
Holding my breath will not make disappointment go away. Nor will refusing to smile.
In the most profound way, the surgeon knows that to induce growth within the body, it is sometimes necessary to deliberately micro-wound the skin.
Remarkably, this endurance of suffering inspires the body to refresh.
It’s natural to frame our personal catastrophes as damaging, scaring, diminishing to who we are and what we’ve been. But sometimes we allow ourselves to become so kindred with the loss, that the loss itself becomes our identity.
we were created to live in the healing,
not the loss—
Even if the healing is only for a little while.
Even when the healing is sometimes too microscopic to see.
Taking notes from my body, I am learning to reframe the wound as a motivation to refresh—
To allow healing to do its work [fast or slow] amid the heartache, day by day.
To guard my spirit, heart, mind so that the hard moment doesn’t harden me.
To live in the belief that everything has its season.
To adopt the mantra: Nothing. Lasts. Forever.
To agree that nothing I go through is either “all good” or “all bad.”
To depart from the agreement to chronic stress.
To lean into the necessity for rest.
To rest in the assurance that all things heal with time.
Then, to rest in Him.
I remind myself that even in my weakness, my hands are as capable of caring for myself as they are for others. For those of us who are ‘other-focused’ this revelation is profound.
I take heart that while we all go through seemingly perpetual and unending cycles of distress, healing isn’t something “coming,” it is happening [in and through us] now.
Psalm 139:14
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NOTES ON HEALING: Trust that the world [just as the body] is designed with its own intricate and miraculous system to heal.
Cells are designed to heal themselves when they become unhealthy and replicate to replace destroyed or damaged cells. If you break a bone, your body immediately begins producing new cells to heal the damage. When your skin is cut, platelets in your blood clot to stop the bleeding, white blood cells remove the dead, injured cells and new healthy cells repair the damaged tissue. Daily wear and tear are also promptly dealt with. In fact, our bodies are in a constant state of removing damage and producing new, healthy tissue.
Our immune system is also meant to deal with intruders such as viruses, bacteria, and toxins. Mucus traps foreign materials, acids in various organs kills organisms, and a type of white blood cell called phagocytes engulf and destroy invaders. Natural killer cells recognize when one of our own cells have been invaded by a virus and destroy the infected cell. Inflammation, while it seems like it should be a problem, is actually your body’s reaction to an injury or infection, allowing your immune system to focus on restoring the injured or infected area to health. A fever is your body raising its temperature to levels that will kill viruses and bacteria. The elevation in temperature also triggers certain cellular mechanisms which help your body fight the infection.
Bodies also heal and regenerate themselves through stem cells. As a fetus is being formed in the womb, embryonic stem cells divide and differentiate into all the necessary cell types to mature into a fully developed human. Once the body is formed, the embryonic stem cells disappear and their descendants, adult stem cells, are left behind. Your adult stem cells divide, producing an identical daughter stem cell and a healthy, mature cell of a specific type. Unlike embryonic stem cells, each type of adult stem cell only has the ability to become certain types of tissue. For example, Mesenchymal Stem Cells have the ability to regenerate bone cells, fat cells, muscle cells, and cartilage cells, Neural Stem Cells help to regenerate nerve tissue in the brain and spinal cord, and Epithelial Stem Cells regenerate skin. Adult stem cells can reproduce for a long time but are not immortal and will eventually stop reproducing as efficiently as they did when you were young.