No one goes through life unscathed. Scathing is, in fact, the process that wears away the dross of arrogance and entitlement, of preeminence and pretention. The pruning goes on all our lives until we grow into whatever shape or substance we are meant to become.

We are not born whole physically. We are carried for years, nurtured for decades, educated for most of our lives. And we are not born wholly spiritual either. We wander from one god to another that we substitute for the God who is God. We learn by both the development of virtue and the degradation of sin. We come to new life by almost dying from the pain that comes with living. And in the end, we are healed by the God who always means our welfare and never our woe.

"No wound in so trivial that the love of God is not concerned with it,” Flora Wuellner wrote. Her words made me consider my own life, my own needs for healing across the years. My healing God has always healed every wound, not by erasing it but by numbing it, by taking away its sting; not by fixing it but by providing something in its place: for a freer world, a steady one; for this community, a larger one; for one rejection or another, a new welcome somewhere else of something in me that I did not myself know I had. And so my world has evolved from wound to wound. Thank the God who heals.

—from Called To Question by Joan Chittister (Rowman & Littlefield)