My daughter’s favorite princess dress is in tatters, the side seams and the waist seam ripped open from on-and-off-again dress-up games, the hem fallen from years of wearing to every possible occasion. She wears the Snow White dress to the store, to daycare, to the park and to church. I joke that my church really does accept all who come to the worship princesses or not. Heck, there may be several princesses at our communion rail every week; mine just happens to be dressing the part. I’ve been dreading the day when the dress is beyond repair, when we finally have to retire it, but it clings together, doggedly. Although the seams are open and the hems falling, the velvet flattened and the satin dull, you can still clearly see the essence. For every rip and tear, there is a story of loved use and devoted purpose.
I love objects with dents and tears. The most precious things to me are the most tattered and torn: the favorite pair of jeans during college, which became my favorite pair of shorts, and were only “retired” after another 10 years, when they were the merest suggestion of a garment, and certainly not something a respectable mother in her 30s should be wearing; the leather jacket given to me for my 14th birthday, worn smooth and shiny in parts, worn cracked and paper-thin in other parts, of which my husband says, “you’re not really going to WEAR that, are you?, but which I cannot give away, no matter what; my first pair of well-made riding boots, which cost a month’s salary and have been resoled, patched and repaneled by my excellent cobbler so often that there is no actual original part left to them, but which I will wear as long as I can still slip my calves into them. Those are the objects, the fabrics that bind the pieces of my life. The more rips and holes, the more I love them.
When my dad had something new, a new truck, a new pair of boots, a new tool, when it finally got a scratch, dent or ding, he celebrated. “Good! Now, it’s really mine and I can relax about it,” he would say. He defined his possessions by their scars. The more wear something had, the more it belonged to him, the more its essence showed through.
Life is rough and we show the wear of it. If we’re lucky, we start out new and fresh and perfect, and then we start living. Daily use dulls the sheen of our soul, crushes the velvet of our psyche a little at a time. And that’s just the regular stuff, not even counting the REAL sad stuff, the grief that rips at our seams, the failures that open our hems, the pain that punctures our fabric. I don’t know why life is difficult and fraught with suffering. People smarter than I am have written books on it.
I do know one thing. I know that, like my daughter and her precious Snow White dress, God doesn’t throw us out because we are rent and torn. Sometimes God mends us, carefully, thoughtfully, with stitches that bind us up stronger than before. Sometimes we keep the tears, the holes and the fraying pieces, but that doesn’t make us ugly, not to God. She loves us more for all the holes.
God didn’t put them there, but she can make them hurt a little less. No way do I believe God wishes us to be hurt, ripped open or scarred. God does not will bad things to happen, nor allow them to happen to teach us a lesson. God does not set us up with challenges to test us. The God of love which I worship is not an eternal examiner. Still, in life, bad things happen, things that wound and scar. My soul may be tattered and torn, but the love of God makes my holes holy.
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