The Purpose in Our Wounds

Come, let us return to the Lord;

For he has torn us, that he may heal us;

He has struck us down, and he will bind us up. (Hos. 6:1 ESV)

What an unpleasant thought! The Lord has torn us and struck us down? Surely not. The Lord is my Shepherd. The God I know is “merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness” (Ps. 86:15 ESV).

How can I reconcile a tearing, striking God with a God of mercy, graciousness, and steadfast love? James says, “You have heard of the steadfastness of Job, and you have seen the purpose of the Lord, how the Lord is compassionate and merciful” (Jas. 5:11 ESV). Yes, I have heard of the steadfastness of Job, but does his story of pain and suffering and loss bring to mind God’s compassion and mercy?

As privileged witnesses of the scenes in heaven, we can watch Job’s harrowing story unfold from a comfortable distance, knowing that God was in absolute control all the time. In contrast, it can be exceedingly difficult to see any purpose when we’re smack in the middle of our own sufferings. Often, our personal stories play out so slowly, we can’t imagine what good could possibly come from the misery. Waiting and wondering can be the most painful part of pain.

God gave us the stories in his Word because he knows how we learn. Stories can teach us concepts that are difficult to grasp through bare naming and telling; “Be patient! Trust God!” They can help us relate to the situations of others that we may never experience ourselves. The best stories become the shared knowledge of a culture that we can use to remind each other how to explain and view the world.

C. S. Lewis said he wrote his children’s stories in an attempt to steal past the “watchful dragons” of religious inhibitions that keep us from feeling as we ought to feel about God. Most of us can’t manufacture the “right way” to feel just because we’re told to.

I wonder if Lewis was thinking of Hosea 6:1 when he was writing The Horse and His Boy. The beginning of the story is about escape. A peasant boy named Shasta and a talking horse from Narnia named Bree team up to escape their harsh masters. “To Narnia and the North!” Nearby, a girl of noble birth, Aravis, has escaped her stultifying life with the help of another talking horse from Narnia, Hwin. The two pairs of strangers are driven together as they run from roaring lions, and they continue their journey in company.

In order to buy herself time to escape, Aravis drugged one of her maids so she would sleep for a night and a day. When Aravis tells her story to Shasta and Bree, Shasta asks what happened to the maid. “‘Doubtless she was beaten for sleeping late,’ said Aravis cooly. ‘But she was a tool and a spy of my stepmother’s. I am very glad they should beat her.’”

After some narrow escapes and trying circumstances, the four find themselves on a forced march across a desert carrying an urgent message. As they near the end of the journey, suddenly they are again threatened by a huge lion. It chases them, and the horses have to run at top speed, though they’re already exhausted. The lion claws Aravis’s back, then abruptly turns and leaves when Shasta runs at it and tells it to go home.

This just happens to take place practically in the doorway of the lovely sheltered home of a hermit. The horses are spent and Aravis is wounded, so Shasta has to leave them in the hermit’s care and go on alone to carry the message. I related some of his further experience with the lion in another post.

With the message delivered, the good guys saved, and the bad guys dealt with satisfactorily, the tying of loose ends begins. While Bree, Hwin, and Aravis wait for news from Shasta, Aslan, the Lion, “the great deliverer of Narnia,” reveals himself to them. After their bad experiences with lions, they aren’t immediately thrilled to see him. Hwin is first to submit to him, and it doesn’t take long for Bree to repent of his pride.

Aslan calls Aravis to himself and tells her he is the only lion they met on their journey, and that it was he who wounded her. He tells her the purpose of her wounds.

“The scratches on your back, tear for tear, throb for throb, blood for blood, were equal to the stripes laid on the back of your stepmother’s slave because of the drugged sleep you cast upon her. You needed to know what it felt like.”

When Shasta comes back and tells Aravis his story, he tells her that Aslan “seems to be at the back of all the stories.” It is well that Shasta has learned this at a young age. As the creator and savior of Narnia, Aslan is at the back of all the stories.

Our Creator isn’t merely at the back of all the stories. He is the story.

When Hwin met Aslan, she said, “You may eat me if you like. I’d sooner be eaten by you than fed by anyone else.”

I say, with Job, “Though he slay me, yet will I trust him” (Job 13:15 ESV).

However torn and bleeding I find myself, believing I’m engraved on the palms of the Author’s hands, I trust he knows exactly the right number of scratches necessary to bring my story to its fitting conclusion.

My Savior assures me, “I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand. My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all, and no one is able to snatch them out of the Father’s hand” (John 10:28-29 ESV).

Through the gift of a faithful mother and grandmother, Diane Pendergraft grew up knowing Jesus as a friend. Married for nearly two-thirds of her life, there has been time for several seasons, from homeschooling to owning a coffee shop. She has three grown children and eight grandchildren. An element of this season is writing about literature and life at Plumfield and Paideia.

Photograph © Zdeněk Macháček, used with permission