A time to bleed

Blood is startling. Unsettling. Makes stomachs roil and nerves turn weak and limbs shaky.

Especially when it's drenching your daughter's pillow first thing on a Monday morning.

Nosebleed, apparently, during the night. Didn't know that right away, just woke to my little's face smeared with dried blood, coating her hands, and soaking her pillow crimson red on snow white.

"It's okay, Mama." She said as I scrubbed her down in the bath, washrag turning pink in my still trembling hands. "I got it all out. All that was clogging my nose inside? It's all gone now. That's good, right?"

So many of us are so scared of blood. Yet, blood is literally life. It's beyond crucial for survival. We're just not accustomed to seeing it.

And when we do see blood, it usually means something is wrong. Because our blood is supposed to be on the inside of us.

When it's on the inside - of sight, out of mind - we take it for granted. We don't give a single passing thought to the pumping of life inside us as we go about our day and our work and our schedules and to-do lists. No, we only notice when that cycle has stopped, when the skin has broken through or the scab has pulled away and all that is life flows to the outside. Staining pillows right on through and drying fast on fingers and matting in hair.

So we stifle it. We bandage it up and clot it up and pray for it to stop. Stop bleeding. Stop pouring. Stop oozing life. We need that life inside us, we desperately want it to stay right where it is. Within. Hidden. Safe.

Out of sight. Out of mind.

But what if...

What if we all bled a little more?

What if the hope that is Christ, the joy that is Christ, the victory that is ours through Christ - our very life - bled through us and right on out and drenched everything we touched in a reminder of Calvary? What if we left behind permanent crimson stains that couldn't be ignored, that shouted LOOK HERE, that demanded to be acknowledged and dealt with?

What if we stopped bandaging our bleeding souls and got real and real honest and said "I'm hurting! I want to make it stop! But look how Jesus is turning my crimson stains into pure white right before our very eyes?"

What if today, we put away the Band-aids of denial, of distraction, of symptom-stopping inside of disease-curing, and bled? What if today, we just bled?

"I got it all out. It's all gone now. That's good, right?"

"So good, baby. So good."