There’s a spot along the canyon trail where the river shoulders into a hard left bend—calm on the inside, turbulent on the outside, like it’s trying to make up for lost time. That outer bank takes a beating. Years ago—probably sometime between the Great Depression and Elvis—the fix was simple: stuff a few junked cars into the bank and call it erosion control.
And it worked. Sort of.
Today, you can still spot the tailfins of old Chevys and Packards poking out of the dirt like fossils of the American ego. Rusted, half-buried, but unmistakable. A reminder that nothing ever really disappears. We don’t throw things away—we just toss them somewhere else. And eventually, they show back up.
Nature doesn’t forget.
Neither does the body.
Or the soul.
We like to talk about healing like it’s a cleanup job: rest up, take your vitamins, rub on some Vicks. But real healing—bone-deep, ecosystem-level healing—takes time. A lot of it. Alpine tundra might need a century to erase a footprint. Deserts can take fifty years to recover from a motorcycle track. Prairie grasslands and temperate forests rebound faster, but even then, the deeper the wound, the slower the repair.
Our bodies aren’t much different. At forty, you’ll bounce back from a scratch in a week. A sunburn, a bruise, a sore knee—annoying, not defining. But break a bone or go under the knife, and the recovery stretches out. At seventy, even simple wounds drag on. Skin thins. Blood flow slows. Scar tissue builds. Healing still happens, but it rarely looks like turning back the clock. Sometimes it feels more like a negotiation.
And then there are the injuries we don’t see. The ones we try to outrun. The story you don’t tell anymore. The moment that changed you without permission. The loss you never really metabolized. That kind of healing doesn’t follow a schedule. It won’t be rushed. It won’t be reasoned with. It waits until you stop pretending you’re fine.
Which brings us to the soul.
Bessel van der Kolk wrote that “trauma is the imprint left by experience.” And Jesus, notably, didn’t promise a rewind. He promised peace. Healing, yes. But wholeness? That’s something else. Even in resurrection, Christ still bore scars.
Apparently, glory doesn’t erase the evidence—it transfigures it.
That distinction matters. Healing is functional—it’s the closing of a wound, the quieting of pain. But wholeness is relational. It’s the reweaving of identity, the slow work of integrating what’s been broken into something still beautiful. Healing is something we monitor. Wholeness is something we embody.
We don’t usually know when healing is done. We just wake up one day and realize we’re not flinching anymore. That we can touch the memory without it touching back. That we can tell the story without being undone by it.
Back at the river, I stood a while looking at those old cars. I don’t know who drove them or how they ended up sacrificed for the sake of flood control. But I know this: even in their decay, they held the bank. They did what they were asked to do. Now they sit half-visible, rusting reminders that the past doesn’t disappear—it sediment-layers itself into the present. Whether or not I agree with how things were handled back then, I have to acknowledge that someone, with limited tools and knowledge, did what they thought was best. Maybe that’s not failure. Maybe that’s what grace looks like from the other side.
And maybe that’s not a flaw. Maybe that’s the way through.
Maybe healing isn’t about going back. Maybe it’s about learning to live forward with what remains. To bless what broke you. To walk upright with a limp. To recognize that even the Cadillacs in the riverbank are still doing their job. Today, we might use a rock wall or freeway pylon for the same purpose. Will a generation from now look back at our improvements and scoff—or will they give us a modicum of grace for doing the best we could with what we had?
Wholeness, then, isn’t the absence of pain. It’s the presence of grace in the middle of it. The kind that doesn’t erase the past but weaves it into something steady. Honest. Strong enough to hold the bank.
Because in the end, there is no away.
Just here.
Just now.
Just you—carrying what’s been buried, what’s been broken, and what’s been quietly made new.
Sources
- Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score. Penguin Random House, see also: Goodreads quote
- John 14:27 — “Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you…”
- John 20:27 — Christ invites Thomas to touch His scars.
