Blind To Your Scars

This last two months have been an interesting rollercoaster in my life. After months of therapy and counseling, the woman I had poured my heart and soul into told me, “I think you have a good handle on things. You’re healing! I don’t think we need to schedule another appointment.”

People, I felt like I had just graduated with my PhD! Sure, there were still emotions there, but I knew I had the tools to deal with them.

I walked out of that door with my head held high, feeling like I was walking out of the wilderness I had been wandering through since the morning my world completely shattered. I was content with my life as it was and though there are always hardships, there wasn’t anything huge that I felt like I couldn’t deal with properly. 

How naive I was. I thought I was fine. I thought I was emotionally healing. But I was blinded to the scars. 

If you have ever had surgery or an injury that left a mark, you know how that scar feels. 

Sometimes they are sensitive for years. You can be healed from your injury, but you touch that scar in just the right way and the tragedy that caused it feels like it just happened all over again. 

Some scars are numb. I had surgery on my wrist when I was in high school. To this day I could stab myself in that same location and I wouldn’t feel the pain I was inflicting on myself.

Other scars are just visible. They don’t cause physical pain or make you feel jaded, you can just always see them. It’s like they are glaring back at you every day, reminding you of a time gone by. 

Each scar feels different. Each one cannot be ignored. 

I recently felt like all of my scars came into view again. Some caused deep pain. Some felt numb. Others were just there as a reminder of my own mistakes or the mistakes of others. All brought a huge amount of pain that I didn’t see coming.

So let me just unscrew the halo for a hot second… I’m a fiery and feisty person. When my feathers get ruffled, I react. Needless to say, I don’t always react well. Sometimes I just react with honestly that isn’t well received. Other times, I react in a completely different way. 

Some stabs at certain scars will shut me down. That, my friends, is where the danger lies. It’s not necessarily in the fire, it’s in the silence. That’s where your mind games begin. 

The silence is where you start to believe the negative thoughts that come hand-in-hand with your scars. 

Friends, let me say this loud and clear: 

Your scars don’t define who you are!

That is not all that you are, however they have helped shape you into who you have become and who you WILL BE. If that sounds like a contradiction, then you are reading it wrong. 

The scar can be ugly, but the healing journey that came from it is what matters. 

In the last few weeks I have had all of my scars exposed and prodded. With that came unwanted memories of the wilderness; of the struggle and the hurt and the sadness. I felt myself believing that the scars were all that were left of me and that I would never really be whole again. That belief is a lie. 

I have to make the choice to see my scars as something different. I have to see them as war wounds. Not because I suffered in a battle, but because the injury didn’t take my life. I am alive and well and ready to fight again. I still bare the scars and I always will. But, I can look at them and remember the mistakes in the past so I don’t make them again in the future. Nothing is more irritating then watching history repeat itself. How do you keep that from happening? You acknowledge the scar that you walked out of your wilderness with. 

God never waists your pain. I have mentioned this before. The scars we carry out of the wilderness are a gift, not a curse, because they are a reminder that you battled and that you are still alive to tell the story. 

Don’t let your scars defeat you. Don’t believe that that is all anyone can see. Your scars are for you, not for them, but you cannot stay blind to the fact that they are there. You will have them forever, they just change shape. You have to accept that fact.

So ask yourself this: What scar do you bare and are you using it to fight your next battle or is the scar using you to cause defeat? 

Because the truth is, the scar doesn’t make that decision…. you do! So make the right one!