Wounds needing healing

From the blog "Barnstorming"

by Emily Polis GIbson, a physician and farmer in Washington State

"All day long I look for wounds needing healing in my work.  Some are visible and obvious.  Most are invisible.  Sometimes I am not even sure what wounds I’m looking for as my patient won’t or can’t tell me.  I need to probe the surface and then peel away the layers, deeper and deeper,  until I find where it hurts.

Some wounds never do reveal themselves as the patient has no intention of letting them be discovered.  The suffering, intense as it is, remains unrelieved and unknowable.

Not so the wounds described in Isaiah, revealed as our tender God unfurls, willingly exposing His selfless bruised core."

Isaiah 53

 ¹ Who has believed our message
   and to whom has the arm of the LORD been revealed?
² He grew up before him like a tender shoot,
   and like a root out of dry ground.
He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him,
   nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.
³ He was despised and rejected by mankind,
   a man of suffering, and familiar with pain.
Like one from whom people hide their faces
   he was despised, and we held him in low esteem.

 ⁴ Surely he took up our pain
   and bore our suffering,
yet we considered him punished by God,
   stricken by him, and afflicted.
⁵ But he was pierced for our transgressions,
   he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was on him,
   and by his wounds we are healed.
⁶ We all, like sheep, have gone astray,
   each of us has turned to our own way;
and the LORD has laid on him
   the iniquity of us all.