The Rough Places

There is a window next to my bed, and no matter how I divert the panels on the blinds, a sliver of morning sunlight always manages to maneuver right into my protesting eyes. Yes, I know what some of you are thinking: “What? You aren’t awake before the sun comes up? You aren’t working hard before the break of dawn? Kid, you deserve what you’ve got coming to you on bright mornings!”

Well to appease the critics of my sleep schedule, I am wide awake in those wee hours before the sun rises, but it’s usually because I have not yet gone to bed, not because I am just waking up. I’m in college, and that’s just how we rabblerousing, young whippersnappers tend to operate.

One particular morning, however, as the light made its assault on my innocent eyelids, I lifted a hand to cover them and opened my eyes. What I saw intrigued me. My left hand was suspended in the air, the light hitting it directly. The shade of my fingertips was distinctly lighter than the rest of my hand. Everything below held the typical, fleshy hue, but those tips were golden and appeared to be filled with the light of the sun.

I held up my right hand to see if the same thing would happen, but the fingers were evenly toned all the way to the tips. The reasons for this, I realized, was that I had formed callouses on my left hand fingertips from years of playing guitar. It’s turned them a few layers thicker and a few shades lighter.

As the glimmer passed through the nearly translucent surfaces of my fingers the color difference created a subtle glow that appeared to be emanating from the skin itself. I won’t lie: it reminded me of E.T. trying to “phone home.” But it occurred to me that those battered, rough places—the constant reminders of hours spent working on my craft—were something like a heavenly badge of honor. The rest of my skin had not been subjected to the same meticulous brutality in the pursuit of excellence, but those tiny places had experienced pain, intensity, and pressure.

There were days after I had been playing for hours that I looked down and saw blood trickling down the face of my guitar because I had split my fingers open. Just like most disciplines, this one required some level of pain. But it’s those places that have been beaten and torn and pushed to the limits that glow; they are the places from which the light radiates.

I drew a comparison to the areas of my heart, mind, and soul that have been “buffed out,” if you will, with the constant strenuous work and even barrages of difficulty and pain that come with relationships.

All of us understand that maintaining healthy relationships is hard work. There are places inside of each of us that have endured through the endless repetitions of love’s harshest challenges. Some areas have been hit so hard that it killed the layers on the surface, just like the times when the skin of my fingertips had been split open and was replaced with new, stronger flesh. The principle holds true: the layers that grow back over damaged places grow back stronger. But sometimes the temptation is to let those replacement layers become a shell—a rough exterior that nothing and no one can penetrate.

How do we keep this from happening? The answer, quite simply, is practice. There is no magic formula for dealing with the difficulties of love except love itself. We keep choosing to do it when it hurts, when it’s hard, when it’s boring, and when it’s easy because skillful hearts, much like skillful hands, can create beautiful things.

We can’t determine what the natural processes of life will do to our hearts, just like we can’t voluntarily make our skin grow. How our hearts form and reform once they’ve been subjected to the elements is outside of our control. And the elements we subject them to are only sometimes in our control. The rest of the time anything goes, and we can’t possibly know what’s going to happen to us. But there is one thing we always get to choose: what we do with our calloused hearts once they’ve had some practice in the joys and jabs of love.

There are always going to be rough places on our hearts just as on our bodies. Relationships can rip away and sand us down. But we mustn’t shy away from the hard work and discipline that creates callouses on our hearts. For perseverance in these things reaps the great rewards of intimacy, and character, and wisdom. Hard flesh on our hearts is a sign of consistent use, not necessarily misuse. It’s only when those hearts start becoming more like stone than flesh that we should be concerned. 

In any case, we don’t get to choose whether or not we have callouses, only if we’ll keep waking up every morning and holding them up to the window of vulnerability. Will we rise, face the day, look at the ones we love with all their flaws and rough places and continue to put our hearts to work in loving them? If we do, we’ll see our hearts grow stronger, and the light that shines through them will grow clearer. We’ll get to build long-lasting homes with the right people, instead of jumping from one hastily built shanty to the next. And when the light streams through us, who knows? We might just get to use those rough places as beacons of hope to lead poor, lost souls on home.