It may seem strange, but I imagine that decades from now, some of my fondest memories of St John’s will involve water, in all its troubling and inconvenient forms: Talking on the phone with Doug from my summer vacation in Long Island as he scrambled around the church setting up tarps and buckets to prepare for the hurricane that was on its way; Priscilla showing me how water poured through a particular hole in the outer kitchen ceiling from the windows upstairs, and hearing Tom and John drilling holes in the windowsills to let the water flow through; seeing the look on Louis’s face as our Search Committee chairs showed me around the church for the first time and realizing how badly the paint on the arch in the balcony had peeled; seeing that same arch sanded and painted for the first time as I stood at the altar; watching Simon and the kids scooping shovels’-worth of water out of that vexatious puddle in the Garden; watching half the congregation shovel snow out of the Harvard Mall so we could have an outdoor Christmas service.

This morning (Tuesday), I walked into the building as rain poured down and the nor’easter pummeled the city. I took off my rain pants and jacket, folded up my umbrella, and walked around. Not a sound of gushing water, not a drip-drop anywhere. “Hm,” I thought to myself. “I guess we’re watertight, for now.”

And then the second thought, as I looked up at the ceiling over the stairs. “Was that water damage always there?”

Because I’m a preacher, I live in a three-year lectionary cycle. So I’ve been reflecting recently about March 2020, the last time we heard this set of readings on the Second and Third and Fourth Sundays in Lent, Year A. The crisis and the emergency of the pandemic are over, although the virus and sickness remain. Our lives are mostly watertight, for now. But I can’t help but find myself looking at my life, from time to time, and thinking, “Huh. Was that damage always there?”

You may find the same thing has happened in crises in your life. When the emergency is over, and you’ve made it through to the other side, when you finally have the space to look around, you may see that the damage is still there, that you’re still carrying pain or worry or grief from that time. And that’s okay. Healing is a process that takes much longer than being hurt. (Heaven knows sanding and repainting can take much longer than fixing the leak.)

I’m reminded often of the fact that when Jesus appeared to the disciples after his Resurrection, he did so still bearing his wounds. He appears to them, and he says, “Peace be with you,” and then he shows them his hands and his side. (John 20:19-20) The promise of the Resurrection is not that our wounds will disappear and be forgotten. It’s that they will be transformed, that we will be transformed, still bearing them. For better or for worse, they have shaped us into the people who we are. But there will come a day when they don’t hurt any more, when the storm has passed and the drainage has been fixed and the damage has been repaired; when we can finally look back on all our crises and see the presence of God’s love, working in and through them, despite it all.