Nails

As I drove through a town the other day a red light stopped me at an intersection where there was an old wooden light pole standing at the corner.

It had clearly been there a while based on the condition of the wood. It has undoubtedly weathered a lot of storms.

It wasn’t the light it gave, the power it conveyed through the wires running across the top, or the age of the wood that caught my attention though.

What caused me to stop and stare at it for a few moments were the hundreds, if not thousands of nails, staples, and tacks protruding from its chipped and damaged wood.

There were no signs currently hanging from it but I imagined all the different messages that might have been there at some point.

Yard sales. Bake sales. Cars for sale.

School events. Church meetings. Concert announcements. It was in a small town named Sheffield, Alabama that once boasted of an Elvis Presley concert.

Could that poster have once hung in that place?

Maybe there were slanderous signs at some point. Heated political signs at other times.

Desperation posters about missing pets…or even more urgent, missing persons.

The signs were all gone. But the scars remained. The light pole was not just a light but a storyboard.

But the story of its life could only be read by the light pole itself. No one else knew all of its history. All I…and every passerby could see…were the nails — the scars.

And much of the same is true for you and me. We carry light within us. We might light our little corner of the world with our presence. We light it for our family.

Our neighborhood. Our church. But there are the scars—good and not so good. The storyboard of our life.

We have held up signs too. Maybe we have tried our best, in our own brokenness, to tell of Jesus.

Or we have boasted about our family achievements.

Maybe we have carried signs of our addictions, our failures, our mental illness, or our broken homes.

Scars that might or might not be visible, but tell the story of our lives. Storyboards that only we can read in their fullest extent, but have made us who we are.

But if you will let me, I’d like to tell you about one more Light pole.

It is old. Actually before electricity. But it held a Light. The Light. And there were no less than 4 nails. Four scars.

One was likely meant to ridicule - the King of Jews was the sign hung on it. It was true, but meant more as a jab than a praise.

The other 3 nails were for a body. The body of a perfect life, riddled with scars — not from His own mistakes but scars put there because of our mistakes.

But there is a storyboard for those three nails and the message is meant for us.

If I had to guess the words of the signs on each of those nails they might simply say something like this:

1. You are loved.

2. You are chosen.

3. You are forgiven.

His scars took care of ours.

Oh they are still a part of our story…they brought us to where we are, but those nails don’t define who we are.

The Light that shines in us and through us does. That light is what the world really needs…but sometimes it’s good to be reminded that the brightest lights are accompanied by scars.

Ben