When my mom was a little girl she cut her knee open on a piece of thick plastic. To this day every time she looks down at the scar she’ll tell the story. Especially at Christmas time when all those new packages have that thick plastic wrapped around the goodies inside. Inevitably every year, she will say to someone “that’s the plastic I cut my knee on when I was a little girl”… without fail. It ALWAYS happens. It has become sort of a joke around the house each year.
This summer I thought it was a good idea to go outside in the middle of the night to pull weeds. The problem with pulling weeds at 10 o’clock at night is that you can’t necessarily tell what it is you’re pulling. The next morning I woke up with a terrible itchy rash all over my entire body. My arms, legs, stomach, back, thighs, and face were COVERED in this rash. I went outside just to check that what I pulled out the night before wasn’t poison ivy. When I looked down at the pile of brush that I had pulled I saw that, indeed, I had pulled poison ivy from my flower beds. Not only poison ivy, but poison oak and sumac as well. Needless to say, I was a hot mess. I spent 6-8 weeks with an awful rash that was blistered and seeping, all the while hopped up on Benedryl and Prednisone. I look down at where the rash once was and I see dark patches of scars because of the severity of the rash. It left scars all over my body.
These two instances of scars have reminded me about philosophical scars that we carry with us throughout our lives. These scars can come in many forms. For my mother, her scars came in the form of something happening TO her. It was not her choice that a thick piece of jagged plastic dug deep that it left a 5 inch long scar across her knee. For myself, the scars that were scattered across my body were by my own choice. I was not vigilant when tearing out the weeds that I had allowed to grow in my garden. Are you making the connections of your own scars in your mind?
Some scars that people carry have mutilated us. They have changed the physical make up of our bodies. However, the question remains the same. What are you doing with the scars you carry with you? Do you allow them to continue to remind you of the pain that you suffered, but never moving on from it? Or are you learning from the scar that you carry and know that it was used to smooth out the rough edges of who you are? This is a choice that you must make.
“For it was fitting that he, for whom and by whom all things exist, in bringing many sons to glory, should make the founder of their salvation perfect through suffering”.
-Hebrews 2:10
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