I’ve had an opportunity to spend some time recently pondering wounds and scars. I found myself firstly thinking about Jesus and the scars he wore after his resurrection. Why did He feel the need to keep his scars after all he had suffered the pain of death and paid the price – wasn’t that enough? Well yes, but He also knew that his scars would be necessary for ‘the other’. Jesus wore his scars so that we would look at them and know that he really was the man acquainted with sorrow and suffering. I wonder if our scars are the same. Like many, I have been wounded by the ones who were meant to love and protect me. I have even suffered some self-inflicted wounds as a result of my own pride and desperate need to control. Sometimes simply living in this fallen world has caused wounds. It occurs to me that for much of my life they have remained wounds with only scant evidence of healing, not because the grace wasn’t available to me but because I was never, until recently, able to see the path to receiving that gift. Perhaps there were even times when I wore my wounds as some kind of badge of pity.
As I reflect on my journey to this point, I recognise seasons of grieving and it has been right for those times. If I deny that my wounds have hurt me deeply, I deny my humanity. If I do not sit with my grief long enough for Jesus to apply His healing balm and love me, then how am I truly restored? I am beginning to see my scars not as something to be despised, needing to be covered or eliminated at all costs, but as indisputable evidence of God’s healing in my life. I choose to no longer deny or hide my scars but to embrace them, and I find the more I do, the deeper into that amazing grace I fall. Perhaps all of our scars are meant to be reminders to us of the amazing power of God’s love, but they also stand as a testomony for others that we journey with in life that that same amazing love extends to them. On my best days, because of my Dad’s (God’s) love for me, I am able to walk in the fullness of knowing that I have been deeply wounded and that I am being deeply healed. My scars no longer define who I am or even what has happened to me but they are a part of my story and they speak of healing, and love, and Jesus.