Scraped. Scratched down to the core to reveal what’s raw, what’s real.

A little kid cries when he falls off his bike and scrapes his knee. When his darting eyes catch the sight of blood, he thinks something is wrong and he starts to feel the pain that comes when skin is broken and air licks wound.

You scrape away wallpaper when you’re tired of your room decor and want to paint a new look over your walls. You stand and chip away bits of pink floral paper that you once adored, but now the sight causes you feel like you’re living in your grandma’s guest bathroom. You scrape the walls so that you can bring change. It’s monotonous work, but you know that as you keep going, you are working towards something better.

And when you’re preparing a lovely Thai soup, you will inevitably have to scrape some ginger.

I bet you weren’t guessing this as my next thought, were you?

After a recent cooking lesson with Ivy Entrekin, she taught me that the best way to get to the meat of the ginger root is by scraping it with a spoon. I was ready to start wielding my knife, but when she pulled out a simple silver tea spoon and started scraping away the skin, I learned that her method allowed you preserve a majority of the root, discarding the skin while giving you the most ginger meat possible.

The end result was a beautiful piece of ginger, undressed, but not mangled and hacked away by a knife. The spoon scraping method was rather gentle and in the end, much more effective than using a sharp knife.

Over the last week, I’ve seen myself as this little piece of ginger. Life scrapes away at me, and when it does, it exposes rawness that I often try to hide. Why would I want to be vulnerable? Why would I want to reveal the hurt when I could keep adding layers of thick skin to give the appearance that everything is okay?

But when I let God scrape away the ways of the world that have become glued to me, I realize that He reveals the beauty inside of me that He so intricately wove. The world and my human desires add on layers of skin that cause my eyes to be blind to the purpose He created me for. I pull back and strain when I think my ways are better than His, but this year, I’m not letting myself keep up the habit of hiding behind facades and letting feelings guide my life.

When God is scraping me with that spoon, peeling back the world and letting my true self shine, I’m going to stand tall and embrace it. It may be shocking, it may leave me feeling raw and naked, but I know that it’s the real me. Why would I want to be anything else?