“You have to manipulate the scar.” Nearly three decades ago I had cervical neck surgery requiring a horizontal incision on my neck above the collarbone. Post-surgical treatment required physical therapy. The incision, the entry point for the surgeon’s skill, had healed but left a stiff, uncomfortable scar. When I told the physical therapist about this discomfort, she asked, “Have you touched your scar?” I said, “No, I am repulsed by it.” I have never forgotten her reply, “You have to manipulate the scar.”

Thomas has no such hesitation about scars as he encounters the news about Christ’s resurrection. “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe,” he says. Thomas is “all in” with this Resurrection news—as long as he can manipulate the scar.

One problem with Christian faith is our tendency to over-spiritualize. We speak of divine things and holy things and things of heaven, but too often we disconnect them from things of earth. Jesus taught in parables to make the infinite finite. When Jesus taught his disciples to pray, he taught them to ask, “Thy kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven” (emphasis mine). Jesus breathed on the disciples. Breath is what you have when you’re alive and what you don’t when you’re not. Christianity that promises only “pie in the sky when you die by and by” robs resurrection of its power in the world in which we live. Like manipulating a scar, earthy faith isn’t always pretty. Yet it is the connection between the spiritual promise of eternal life and our daily life in the physical world.

Repulsed by your scars? Try a little of Thomas’s boldness.