Can you tell the difference?

This is a photo of my two thumbs. My left thumb (which is on your right) is a bit pointier than the other one (probably because my entire left hand is a tiny bit leaner than my right), and it also has a funky guitar callus that juts out on the joint. But I'd like to bring your attention to the fingerprint area. Without a microscope, can you see any difference between these two thumbs? Do they appear identical? Does my left thumb show any evidence of any past trauma? Years ago, I got a second-degree burn on my left thumb. It's been completely healed for a long time, but that experience was so crazy that I'm going to blog about it and the healing process.

Before I continue, I'd like to offer a tiny disclaimer. I've noticed that I've been blogging lately about things that are gross. But grossness is sometimes a natural, necessary part of life. Take snot, for example. Where would we be without snot? It's a substance that runs out of our noses while carrying away infections. It's nasty and beautiful simultaneously. Thank you, reader, for bearing with my nasty descriptions, and I apologize in advance if any of my writing grosses you out to the point of nausea. I'll try to warn you before you read anything that's extremely gross.

Here's the story about the second-degree burn that I got on my left thumb. One Sunday evening about four years ago, I was cooking dinner. (Or depending on how you look at it, I was defrosting dinner. The leftovers from that evening would be my dinner for the rest of the week.) Back then, it was routine for me to boil some rice, microwave some frozen veggies, and warm up some frozen fish fillets in the oven. When it was time for me to turn over the fillets about halfway through their cooking time, I opened the oven door and removed the baking sheet. What actually happened here is kind of vague in my memory. I think I used a potholder to remove the baking sheet from the oven like I usually did, but the potholder must have slipped, or maybe I just forgot to use a potholder altogether, because my left thumb wrapped around the baking sheet that had been cooking at about 375 degrees. What I do remember clearly is shouting in pain, tossing the baking sheet onto the stove, and running my thumb under cold water. I think I remember my thumb having indented red marks that were shaped like the baking sheet, but I mostly remember the white blisters. One of the blisters was so big that it covered most of the fingerprint area of my thumb.

The hour that followed the burn was pretty scary. My thumb felt like it was on fire. The only things that kept it from feeling like it was on fire were running it under cold water or smashing it against an ice cube. The pain was so bad that I was groaning out loud. I couldn't even function. All I could do was run my thumb under cold water or smash it against an ice cube and try to stop hurting. It was scary. I didn't know what kind of damage the burn had done to my skin. What kind of a burn was this? Was I about to lose my thumb? I prayed for God to heal my thumb. I put some ice in a plastic bag, smashed my thumb against it, and drove to a nearby convenience store and bought some Neosporin so that I wouldn't have to spend the rest of my life relieving the pain with cold water or ice. After I got home, I was disappointed to discover that Neosporin didn't ease the pain at all. I quickly ate my dinner, fed my cats, smashed my thumb against some ice, and drove myself to the emergency room. To add to the serious mood, I think it was raining, too.

After waiting in the ER for a long time (and going through at least one small bag of ice that the staff was kind enough to provide), I finally saw a doctor who took a quick look at my wound and immediately diagnosed it as a second-degree burn. After he left, the nurse came, bandaged my wound, and showed me how to do it because I would need to keep my thumb bandaged for the next several weeks while it was healing. She applied an ointment (silver sulfadiazine cream) to my burn that worked a million times better than Neosporin. Then I left the hospital with instructions on how to care for the burn; the instructions explained that it would take about six weeks to heal.

I drove to a pharmacy and filled a prescription for painkiller, and by the time I got home and got to bed, it was around 4 or 5:00 in the morning. I called in sick from work (via email) and slept in. A wound that only took up about an inch of my body consumed and disrupted my entire evening and would affect my entire life for the next few weeks.

When I returned to work the following day, to my job that required lots of typing, I was thankful to see that my left thumb is the digit that I use the least (if at all) when I type. I'm pretty sure it was God's mercy that I ended up burning that thumb and not any of my other fingers.

During this time, I became a connoisseur of bandages. I experimented with which brands of gauze and adhesive tape to use and how much to use. Living alone suddenly stank because there wasn't anyone to bandage my wound for me. It was just me and my nine other fingers bandaging up my blistered little nasty-looking thumb.

About one week later, it appeared that something miraculous had happened. The blister on my thumb went down and turned yellow. I thought that my thumb had healed early. Forget the ointment, the gauze, and the tape; I could get away with using only regular Band-Aids. Forget the hospital instructions for the six-week healing. My wound had healed in only one week! Right? Nope. My healing had barely started.

The original now-yellow layer over my thumb peeled off and exposed a deep, raw layer of skin underneath. This part of the healing process was almost more painful than the original burn itself! I needed to continue the bandaging process with the ointment, the gauze, and the tape. A tiny little one-inch burn not only hijacked a Sunday evening and a Monday, but it also dominated my daily routine for the next six weeks or so.

While my wound was healing, I walked around with a white bandaged thumb, and I sometimes got interesting responses from people. Some people showed sympathy and pity. Many of them simply asked what happened, and then they empathized, and we swapped burn stories. One person remarked, "That's what you get from frying up fish." Well, I wasn't frying (I was baking), and all I was doing was trying to cook dinner like a normal human being, and was this person insinuating that the trauma to my thumb had been all my fault?

"Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there? Why then is there no healing for the wound of My people?" (Jeremiah 8:22)

"He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds." (Psalm 147:3)

Emotional healing can be very similar to my second-degree burn's healing. A trauma can happen and cause severe pain that can seem to halt your life for a while. You try to stop or relieve your pain, possibly trying several different methods, but the pain is acute and insistent. Finally, you talk to an expert and get help. Maybe you find a professional counselor, or maybe you get help from somebody at church. However, the Wonderful Counselor who is always available -- regardless of however many fallible human counselors you talk to -- is God. Jesus is like a doctor who will diagnose your wound and prescribe treatment for it more accurately than anyone else. He's like a nurse who will spend time with you, clean out your wound, and carefully, skillfully bandage it up so that it will heal properly. He's the ointment, the balm, that covers the wound and absorbs the pain. He doesn't make you feel guilty for getting wounded in the first place. He talks to you, helps you, encourages you, assures you, comforts you, heals you.

Sometimes this healing can happen at different levels or in layers. Maybe you think one area is healed because it doesn't hurt anymore, but maybe God sees more underneath that needs to be taken care of. Maybe the top layer needs to peel off so that He can dig deeper and heal the wound more thoroughly. Maybe there's an infection, and He needs to flush it out. Maybe there are root issues that have never been dealt with. God isn't always in a hurry. He's patient. I think sometimes He waits until we're willing to be healed or until the timing is just right. He made all of us individually (Psalm 139:13-14), and He knows that we're all wired differently. I don't think every prescription or treatment will work for everybody.

Frankly, one reason why I became so depressed and sick 12 years ago is because people around me kept telling me that I was fine because I had already done certain counseling. But I wasn't fine, and I couldn't put my finger on it at the time, and I probably didn't understand at the time that my pain was worth investigating. Another reason why I slipped down into a pit of despair was because I took bad advice. And quite frankly, my whitewashed upbringing didn't help, either. Sometimes stuff just pops out, unplanned, out of the blue. It's OK to hit the pause button for a while so that God can take care of an issue, instead of plastering on a smile, comforting yourself with a platitude like "Everything happens for a reason," beating yourself up for "having a pity party," and pretending that everything is OK, while people around you are wondering why you can't smell the stench in your infected wound.

"My friends and companions avoid me because of my wounds; my neighbors stay far away." (Psalm 38:11)

This paragraph has extremely gross stuff in it, so please feel free to skip it (especially if you have a weak stomach). One evening very recently, I came home to a nasty surprise. There was a hairball on the carpet, and apparently it had been sitting there since I had left that morning. On closer examination, I discovered that it wasn't a vomited hairball. It was a pooped hairball. (What the crap? It was crap!) Cleaning it up was a disgusting task. But I have two kitties that I love extremely much, and they get hairballs just because they're cats. Emitting hairballs is a natural, necessary part of feline life. I would rather my cats vomit or poop a hairball onto my carpet (or couch or wherever it lands) than for the hairball to stay inside them and grow to a deadly size. I heard a story once of a cat that died of a massive hairball. That's terrible. I want my cats to be alive and healthy.

God wants us to be emotionally healthy. Some wounds are more severe than others or just take longer to heal than others. I don't think there's any shame in letting Jesus heal me as thoroughly as He wants to.

A couple of years ago, long after my left thumb had healed and was back to normal, I went through a phase of cooking burritos. I would heat up flour tortillas at the stove, and once in a while I could feel something deep inside my left thumb. It was as if something underneath wanted to peel off or run away. Maybe more healing was happening underneath, or maybe it was just trying to get my attention: "TIRZAH, USE OVEN MITTS!" (Why do I suddenly want to draw a smiley face on my thumb?)

My thumb survived a traumatic incident, and I'm confident that God can help my heart survive all of its traumas, too. Hopefully while my heart gets all healed up, however long it takes -- unless it'll be a lifetime process, which I'd definitely be OK with -- I'll get a huge dose of wisdom along the way. (Don't worry -- I won't try to draw a smiley face on my heart.)