Scars Remind Me
It was a typical Thursday night—I was rushing around trying to pull dinner together for a crew of hungry teenage boys. I had the table loaded with bowls full of spaghetti, salad, and all the fixins. I smelled something burning and remembered the garlic bread that was in the broiler. I yanked the oven door open, used a dish cloth when I should have used an oven mitt, and felt the skin sizzling on my forearm. I managed to save the garlic bread, but there was nothing I could do for my skin. Years later, I can still see the scar.
When I was a little kid, I climbed onto my parent’s bed and started bouncing around. My mom tried her best to catch me as I jumped but it was too late, I had already collided with the nightstand. I ended up with a dozen stitches right in the middle of my forehead. Thankfully, the scar has faded without a trace.
My youngest son has scars, too. Self-inflicted scars from a time when he was high on meth and decided to dig out the hairs on his thighs with tweezers and a needle. He dug into his own bleeding flesh for hours and because he was living on the street in such filthy conditions, the sores became infected and did not heal for months. As I type these words and the images of those days come flooding back in, I can feel the old bruises pulsing in my heart. It has been almost six years since Justin has been clean, and yes, I am healing, but I will never forget what that pain felt like.
Looking at my son now, you would not suspect that he was once a strung-out heroin addict. There are no physical signs of the life he was living, except for the scars on his thighs. Justin recently shared with me that he is grateful he can still see them because they serve as a physical reminder of how far he has come, and he never wants to forget who he was before he found Christ. As much as I hate those scars on his body, I love that he is grateful for the reminder.
I have scars as well. I’m not talking about the burn on my arm, the stitches on my forehead, or the ugly one on my knee from a biking accident—I’m talking about the scars that use to fester angrily underneath the surface of my skin. Scars that occasionally still pull and itch and scream like a siren in my head. Scars from the fear that cut and ravaged my weary soul when I had lost all hope for my son. I was sure I was going to lose him forever, but God had a different plan. Hallelujah!
Sometimes the pain in others isn’t visible—Even if they look fine on the outside, they may be suffering on the inside. If you’re a believer, please join me in prayer for the broken, lost, addicted, and hopeless that walk among us. Pray that they, like my son and I, would come to know Jesus and find freedom in His perfect, redemptive love.