My Wires

“People who have never lost someone close to them have no idea what it’s like,” the anesthesiologist said as he crushed a second plastic tub of peanut butter.

He was leaning back in his office chair in the little anesthesia cubbyhole beside the operating rooms. I have learned from him that it’s possible to eat the peanut butter out of those little plastic tubs without a spoon. He crushes the tub together, forcing the peanut butter out the top, and then eats it like a miniature ice cream cone. 

We were talking about the deaths of our mothers, who both died young. 

What a lot of sorrow and brokenness there is in our world! So much so that the different kinds of pain and sorrow can be foreign to other members of the human race! 

Another time this week, in the blur of an endless week of heart surgery, I was standing at the radiology viewer, looking at the gray and white and black shadows that comprise a chest X-ray. The curving gray ribs and collarbones, the blackness of air space, when I thought of something I’ve heard Dr. Halloran say several times.  

The X-ray I was looking at had something more. After heart surgery, your X-ray is never the same. To get to the heart, the surgeon uses a bone saw which divides the sternum, or breastbone. At the end of the surgery, the surgeon uses a heavy curved needle to thread metal wire through the bone and bring the cut sides back together. He twists the ends of the wires together like a twist tie, snips them, close to the bone, and turns the ends into the bone. 

The wires stay there forever, only to reappear on future X-rays or airport security monitors. 

As I looked at the bones of the vertebrae fitting neatly together, and the row of wires marching down the front like shirt buttons, I thought of Dr. Halloran looking at the X-ray of a patient he didn’t remember and saying, “Those look like my wires.”

Strange, that such a small thing as a row of twisted wires could bear the signature of its designer! 

How much more must God look on his Creations with fondness, with longing for them to reflect his nature! 

Perhaps like a heart surgeon God wonders at our stupidity when we refuse to let him access our hearts. Perhaps he is waiting for us to sign our name on the line consenting to let him work, agreeing to press forward through the pain.

And perhaps, like a heart surgeon, He knows His people best by their redeemed state… By the restoration of the pieces of our broken lives, whether from our own sin or from unexplainable tragedies like young women dying from cancer.

When God looks at the wreck I was, or you were, I think He remembers how it had to get worse before it could get better. I think He remembers the pain we went through and the pain He went through to fix our state. And I think He knows His own, and could say without a doubt, and with perfect confidence in his repair, “Those are my wires!”