Tiny Thots: Elephant Skin | 09.09.10

Early in his journey as a pastor, my husband was asked by his senior pastor about how he handled criticism and situations that personally impacted him. “Not well,” my husband said. “I’m very sensitive.” His senior pastor responded with a slap on the back and these words: “Well, we’re going to help you develop tough skin, elephant skin.”

For years since then, I’ve always thought that was what was happening to us, to me. That as challenging, sensitive, soul-piercing, anger-rising, tear-invoking situations came our way, we were developing tough elephant skin. I believed I could rely upon scars and calluses that I couldn’t see to protect me from the hurts and sorrows of life that people shared continuously with us.

I realized this week, I’ve been wrong. It’s not the scars and calluses that make me able to bear up better in the journey of life. It’s the wounds.

I don’t feel less. I don’t experience less pain. I’m not less affected by others’ situations. Things don’t roll off my back.  

I feel more. I cry more. I hurt more deeply.

Every new wound— feeling the pain of life and always and again experiencing something that cuts deeper into my heart than I’ve  felt before — makes me better able to feel for others. I am a better person even in the hurt that I don’t want or ask for. Wounds help me be compassionate, patient and loving. They show me my humanness, my “wretchedness,” as Paul describes it in Romans 7:24.

Wounds enlarge my heart because I can feel deeper. And when I do that, I let more  of others in. I let more of God in: God in His love, God and His Presence, God and His mercy and forgiveness which heals the wounds and doesn’t allow the heart to break.

I’m understanding better now when scripture describes Jesus as “a man of sorrow and who was acquainted with grief” [Isaiah 53:3]:

But he was pierced for our transgressions,
he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was upon him,
and by his wounds we are healed.

This is a love that doesn’t grow by having calluses that develop over the wounds, but out of woundedness itself.

© Pamela A. Chun | 9 September 2010

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