oice and meaning:
LITTLE UPDATE
I love you. Work here is going really well. I have the opportunity to care for burn patients and spinal cord injury children. Part of my job is debriding, which means we scrub burned tissue until it bleeds in order to remove damaged skin and prevent infection.
Sometimes it is really hard. There are moments when I am scrubbing their wounds and the children are crying and screaming for help. It brings tears to my eyes when they ask, “What did I do wrong? Why are you mad at me?” These kids range anywhere from two or three months old all the way to eighteen years old.
There are a lot of gospel parallels in this. It reminds me of the idea that God sometimes has to “rub us raw” in order for us to grow. Sometimes we try to heal ourselves when the wound is too deep, but it does not go well—it does not heal properly, and it can cause lasting damage. But when we allow proper debridement—or repentance—we are allowing God to create a surface that, once healed, is whole again. Not scarless in the sense of erased experience, but restored in a way that is clean, functional, and made new.
One of my favorite patients is a boy I will refer to as “A” (I cannot use his full name due to patient confidentiality). He is a burn patient and around the same age as Ezra. Eighty-five percent of his body was burned, and he has been in the hospital since this spring.
Whenever you talk to him, he rolls his eyes—not because he is being disrespectful, but because he thinks it is funny. That took me a while to understand; at first, I thought he was constantly annoyed with me. Over time, we have become good friends, and he brings me a lot of joy.
He will be going home soon, which I am happy about—he will finally return to the other side of the country and back to his life. But it is also bittersweet. I have grown attached, and I have seen glimpses of God’s love for this boy through my time caring for him. And now it is time to let him go.
