The Significance of Scars
“Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.” (Kahlil Gibran)
The speaker told the story of a mother that held her young daughter in her arms as they talked. The mother’s face was horribly scarred from burns she had suffered in a house fire several years ago. The little girl hesitantly reached up to touch her mother’s face and spoke sadly, “Mommy, the kids at school make fun of you behind my back. I hear them whisper that you look like a monster. I am embarrassed when you come to my school. Why don’t you look like other mommies?”
The story went on about how the mother looked lovingly at her precious daughter and told the account of how there was a fire one night when the little girl was just a tiny baby. As the fire raged untamed through the house, the baby was trapped in her crib, surrounded by flames. The mother described how she ran through a wall of flames to save her baby girl – her own body shielding that of her daughter’s as she bore the full exposure to the flames that stripped her of her beauty and morphed her face and other exposed skin into a mass of gnarls and painful twists.
You could feel the shock waves pass through the audience as the speaker shared the young daughter’s soft reply as she reached up to caress her mother’s scarred face, “Oh, mommy, I didn’t know. You sacrificed yourself for me. I think you are the most beautiful mommy in the world.”
When we think about physical and emotional scars, we are constantly striving for a way to cover, camouflage, or eradicate them. They are constant reminders of a painful experience inflicted on us or that we brought on ourselves. Scars rarely occur from something pleasant or from something we even want to remember. Nonetheless, they remain regardless of our efforts to remove them.
Bearing the Marks of Life
When a person turns away from a lifetime of poor choices to one of desired integrity, the aftermath is rarely an overnight success with all past mistakes dissolved in a cloud of blissful forgetfulness. What they DO hold in their hands is a slate wiped clean for future hopes – a new page in the diary of life. When someone breaks free from drugs or, perhaps, depression that led them to suicide attempts or they are rescued from the agony of emotional abuse, they incorrectly assume they will open their eyes and the scars from those experiences will be gone.
They blink in frustration that the track marks on their arms from drug needles are still there. Their head bows in sorrow when they see that the twisted scar from the knife across their wrist remains imprinted on their skin. Perhaps you are the one whose spirit sighs when a careless person brings up your past. To this day, it still drives you to your knees. “Why?,” you ask, “I have been set free – reborn.” A Phoenix bird, so to speak, who has “died” in the fire of life to rise again from its ashes to a new identity.
But…with scars.
Everything new but, still, the scars remain. We are discouraged with the weary attempts to cover them so that we do not identify with who we WERE instead of who we are today.
Is it possible scars are there to remind us of the places we never want to go again lest we forget and turn back? Do we view them as chains we cannot break loose from or companions of reassurance that we have overcome pain and now bear the banners of triumph?
Your scars may be marks of encouragement to others who face the same demons you have faced – and that you have triumphed over.
“Some people see scars, and it is wounding they remember.
To me they are proof of the fact that there is healing.” (Linda Hogan)
When Jesus died on the cross, he wretched the very keys of death and hell from the hands of Satan and rose to life again on the third day. Surely he would have risen from this victory over death with a completely healed body, but Jesus still bore the scars of his tortuous death.
What purpose could this serve?
There was one man whose faith hung on the NEED to see these scars. (John 20:25-29) Thomas, one of the twelve disciples of Jesus, proclaimed that he would not believe that Jesus had risen from the dead unless he could physically touch the scars of Jesus. When Jesus appears to Thomas and allows him to touch the scars in his hands and side, Thomas instantly believes and his faith is strengthened.
How we bear our scars matters.
Do we lower our head in shame and defeat when we feel the emotional scars weigh heavily on our heart? Do we cringe and turn away when we see them in the mirror or could we, somehow, raise our heads with dignity that we are the survivors and are finally ready to offer love to someone else who is facing their own rebirth? Will we be transparent with our past sufferings and allow them to be a reflection of assurance that there IS life after scars?
They cannot be eradicated, ignored or wished away, my friend. You are NOT inferior because they are there. They are an intimate part of who you are whether you choose to embrace them or not.
There is purpose – a significance – in scars.
