The Boo-Boo Bunny and Golden Healings
I’m not really good at feelings.
No, I’m not some apathetic fool who thinks feelings are lame, I just have a hard time dealing with them. And I don’t think I’m the only one.
Our world has so much pain, so much brokenness, and yet, we all do our very best to mask our feelings, chase away the pain, remove the scars, and put on a brave face.
Boys are taught that tears are for girls, and girls are taught that crying in front of people makes them weak.
Teenagers intentionally wait an hour to respond to their crush because they don’t want to seem “too interested.”
When new parents are bombarded with questions on how they are adjusting to their new roles, they smile with tired eyes and tell how easy the transition is.
After a hard day, people take solace in a glass of wine, a bottle of beer, a pint of ice cream, putting off working on those tender spots for another day.
When I was little, the boo-boo bunny was a miracle worker. It was a raggedy old ice pack covered with cloth to look like a bunny, and whenever something went wrong, the boo-boo bunny saved us. Bruises, cuts, splinters, bumps, hangnails, and bug bites were all soothed with the boo-boo bunny.
It wasn’t that the boo-boo bunny actually cured the pains and aches, but it numbed it. We proudly sat with the bunny on our boo-boo and let it ease some of the sting.
Even though I’m pretty sure that old boo-boo bunny still sits in the back of my parents freezer, I’ve moved on to other ways of numbing aches and pains. For awhile, it was busyness. I’d overwhelm myself with so many other things, I didn’t have space in my schedule or my life to acknowledge the hurt, to begin the healing process.
It’s easier that way, to be honest. In that moment, ice cream sounds better than getting on my knees and handing my broken heart to God. Saying ‘yes’ to another thing on my schedule excites me more than unburying past scars. Sometimes, you can bury hurts so deep, you can almost convince yourself they don’t exist, or the hurt has healed itself. A few years ago, my dad got a fish hook stuck in his finger, courtesy of my brother, and the rural emergency room doctor thought she got it all out, and sent him home, where it healed fine. Almost exactly a year later, one little piece that had broken off inside his finger resurfaced, and this time, it poked through the skin, angry and inflamed, and he had to have a second surgery to remove it. But for that whole year, his finger was fine, and he wouldn’t have thought there would be any future issues from that accident.
Maybe you’ve done the same. Immediately after you felt pain, you dealt with most of it, but a year later, the hard part you didn’t remove resurfaces, angry and showing up in your daily life.
I don’t know about you, but being busy is exhausting, and it gets old fast. Your heart and body will yearn for peace, for a Sabbath, for a day to catch your breath. And when you do, the boo-boo bunny won’t be able to numb it anymore. That pain will be so evident, your daily life will be affected.
And chances are, you’ll have to have an even bigger surgery to dig out that piece, than if you brought that bruised and beat-up heart to God after you first felt pain.
The boo-boo bunny and a pint of ice cream make you feel better in the moment, numbing the pain temporarily, but God takes it three steps further. When you offer your bruised and broken heart, He scoops it up, every little piece, and puts it back together.
In Japan, when ceramics break, they don’t throw them away or hide the fact that it was once broken. Rather, they intentionally show the broken lines by repairing it with gold, recognizing the history of the piece and incorporating the repair into the new piece, rather than disguising it. This insightful method is called “kintsugi,” and I believe that’s exactly what God does with our hearts.
When we hand Him broken pieces, He binds them back together with His special formula of peace, discernment, and love, making our heart stronger and more beautiful than before.
In what was previously broken, He makes it radiant.
The boo-boo bunny doesn’t even come close to that.
"He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds."
-Psalm 147:3
