photo credit here

this is not a post about Christian hipster culture.

my aim here is not to  make God cool or trendy.
He is content with omnipotence, i’d say.

nevertheless, the prophet Isaiah asserts that the Almighty does, in fact, have a tattoo.

don’t believe me?

read this passage.

yes, God has a tattoo. several of them.  engraved on the palms of His hands, which i’m pretty sure makes him a trend-setter.

and with one word – behold! – he asks us to take notice, to look there and find our own names written … in the place you scribble something you don’t want to forget, in that same tender place where nails pierced our transgressions into blood-borne redemption.

we are not a fading cartoon character stamped on His shoulder from a spring break long ago.  He knows us each — our form, our name.

He knows the entire list of failures that you played in your mind as you drifted to sleep last night, and he knows the ways that we’ll fail again tomorrow, and He wants each of us  to behold his infinite, permanent love and

be changed.

we have been written on to the very skin of the Almighty.

we are engraved and engrafted and beloved, and if we ever begin to doubt, we ought, like Thomas, to beg Him to show us those hands.

you are God’s tattoo. on his palms.   in His hands.