Her Sacred Scars

Scars form as part of the healing process after your skin has been cut or damaged. The skin repairs itself by growing new tissue to pull together the wound and fill in any gaps caused by the injury. Scars develop in all shapes and sizes.

This short story is about the emotional scars a woman accumulates as she journeys through life. She spends most of her life ashamed of her scars, but then Jesus helps her see them differently.

Her Scared Scars

Every woman is on a journey, and its course begins to take shape during her childhood. Her budding personality blooms during the long hours of youth. Childhood days became her mentor – whether dreaming on a swing or watching the ocean waves wash over her carefully made sandcastle, she learns what is possible. Time becomes the soil and sun from which her desires and dreams grow.

The types of roads she will travel in her lifetime are wide-ranging. She will walk through dark and scary valleys where trauma, loss, or even abuse may occur. She will stand victoriously at the top of a high mountain and celebrate an achievement or milestone. There will be days she will plod through the desert and thirst for a way out of her anxiety and depression. Her journey may lead her to a beach where she sits in front of the vast blue ocean. It is here she will again believe that she might be ok in this crazy world.

However, she often finds herself on the plains – the endless, flat, and monotonous byways where the destination appears far off. Each step she takes reminds her that her clock is ticking and time is running out. She feels it is time to get married, time to get pregnant, time to establish her career, and time to make her mark in the world. She starts to panic as setbacks disturb her well-formed plans. As she forges ahead, her pace accelerates until she runs frantically, trying to catch up with herself and her dreams. Anywhere but here becomes her motto.

This young girl is now a woman, and her wounds from betrayal, loss, and disappointment have made her bleed more times than she can count. Some injuries have turned into permanent scars that take up space on her skin. She is obsessed with finding ways to cover them.

There comes a day when she reaches the spot where the horizon and the sky meet. This moment is no longer a long way off, for it has arrived. She looks back at her younger self and marvels at how her journey on this earth looks different from what she expected. She inspects her scars. They have brought too much shame. She knows taking inventory of her traumas always ends up telling the same old story of how they got there.

She cries out to Jesus and asks him to sit next to her while she feels the awfulness of her ugly scars. She asks Jesus, “Why did you let me get injured?”  

Jesus extends his hands for her to see. She gasps at the sight of his unsightly scars. He says, “When I was on the cross, I too asked God why he had forsaken me.”  

She asks him, “Did you get an answer from why you had to go through so much pain?” 

Jesus replies “Yes. Without my wounds, you would not understand how much I love you. My scars give your scars meaning.” 

She sits silently, and Jesus gives her the space to think. “So my scars are there for someone else to understand how much they are loved?”  

Jesus replies, “Yep, those scars of yours will be sacred to someone else. Now go and show them just as I have done for you.”

2 Corinthians 1:3-7

³ Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, ⁴ who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God. ⁵ For just as we share abundantly in the sufferings of Christ, so also our comfort abounds through Christ. ⁶ If we are distressed, it is for your comfort and salvation; if we are comforted, it is for your comfort, which produces in you patient endurance of the same sufferings we suffer. ⁷ And our hope for you is firm, because we know that just as you share in our sufferings, so also you share in our comfort.