Not Defined By Your Scars

It’s far easier to hide emotional scars because the naked eye can’t see them. But I also think it makes it far easier to hold on to them. We can dress them up, cover them up, and hide emotional scars in all sorts of creative ways.

With a physical scar, once it fades it becomes a distant memory. It’s something that happened and you’ve recovered. It becomes a story to tell. But with an emotional scar, it’s easier to hide it rather than expose it.

If we’re not careful, the emotional scar doesn’t fade the way it’s supposed to. Emotional scars can keep us from leading the life we’re supposed to live. We may think things like:“I can’t pursue my dream because I tried and failed.”“I can’t trust again because that trust was broken.”“I can’t believe in that; do you know what happened to me?”“Do you know what I’ve been through?”Those are ways that we reopen a wound that should have healed and faded.

With physical scars, we take extreme care to make them as minimal as possible. Yet with emotional scars, we often don’t do that. We let them heal a little, then reopen them, let them heal a little more and reopen them until it sometimes becomes a bigger scar than it needs to be.

I’m not trying to minimize the things we go through. Emotional scars are real and just as painful to go through as physical ones. But after a season of caring for emotional wounds, it’s time to let the scars fade. It’s time to let them heal and not reopen them. Don’t let your emotional scars become excuses that hinder what God has for your future. You can allow your scars to become a part of the story you tell of God’s overcoming power in your life.

I believe that in this time we’re in right now, God is saying, “Let Me fade your scars.” And in the way only He can, He will.

One evening, my husband and I were flipping through channels and were drawn into watching a show about tattoos gone wrong. It was all about people coming in with horrible tattoos that they wanted the artist to rework into something beautiful. Some of them were misspelled words; others were supposed to be butterflies or birds that looked like neither. It was actually amazing to see what the artists were able to do in order to transform these tattoos.

As I was watching this show, I began thinking about how a scar can be rewritten in the signature of Jesus. With her significant health issues, our adopted daughter Lily wouldn’t have survived in China; those were the words her surgeon spoke to us. So, when I see the scars from Lily’s surgery, I see hope for a great future. I see a restoration and a redemption in her life, because the scars she has and those words the doctor spoke have all been rewritten in the signature of Jesus.“For I know the plans I have for you,” says the Lord. “They are plans for good and not for disaster, to give you a future and a hope” (Jeremiah 29:11 NLT).

When I went through many years of having miscarriage after miscarriage after miscarriage, emotional scars were definitely building up on my heart. Words were being written on me during that time, like failure, hopelessness, bitterness, resentment, grief, sadness. I had to invite and allow Jesus to come in and rewrite those words with His signature.He took my emotional scars and said, “I’m rewriting this into ‘I work all things for good for those who love Me.’” He taught my heart to hope again when I was feeling very hopeless. I could have easily gone another direction, but He wouldn’t let me. He loves us too much to let us go down that road for long.

Many of us have emotional scars that when we look back on them, we can feel the pain all over again. There was a time I couldn’t talk about my miscarriages without feeling the hopelessness and sadness. When I reflect back to those times now, it’s not that I don’t remember the pain, the grief, or the loss, but those negative feelings are gone.

When I look back on it now, I see where God was with me every step of the way and how He turned it all for good.I see how He redeemed those painful, ugly moments by turning them into something beautiful. Now that emotional scar has the signature of Christ.

Every one of our scars can be rewritten by His signature, His narrative. They can become an identifying mark of Him instead of a mark of the wound or circumstance. When you think back on it, the scar doesn’t have to remind you of the person who hurt you or the situation that caused you hurt.You may remember getting the scar and recall what a horrible situation it was. But it can also remind you of Jesus and how He completely transformed your life. Some of you may still be wearing the stigma of your past, or shame, or pain that needs to be turned into the signature of Jesus.

We all have scars of some sort. That’s just life. I heard Beth Moore say you can either be marred by your scars or marked by them. It’s a decision we can make. It can make a mark on you that identifies you in Christ instead of being identified by the scar.

Sometimes the emotional scars we have try to define our hearts with things that aren’t true, that don’t line up from the Word of God. One step we can take to help our emotional scars heal is to tune our hearts.

Keep and protect me, O God, for in You I have found refuge, and in You do I put my trust and hide myself. I say to the Lord, You are my Lord; I have no good beside or beyond You. As for the godly (the saints) who are in the land, they are the excellent, the noble, and the glorious, in whom is all my delight. I will bless the Lord, Who has given me counsel; yes, my heart instructs me in the night seasons (Psalms 16:1-3,7 AMPC).

I love what verse seven says: “My heart instructs me in the night seasons.” The night season can be defined as the dark times, the hard times, the times when we’re dwelling on what caused our scars. We have to be so careful of what defines our heart because it’s what instructs us, guides us, and leads us.

This verse reminds me of the hymn by Robert Robinson, “Come, Thou fount of every blessing, tune my heart to sing Thy grace.” What an incredible prayer to pray: “Tune my heart.”

Sometimes, our hearts need to be tuned. We need to develop our ability to tune in to God’s voice at all times and also be able to tune out distractions that block His voice, distractions such as voices of criticism, doubt, unbelief, and negativity that come at us every day.

When a guitar is out of tune, the song that is meant to be beautiful can sound more like nails on a chalkboard. You know something’s not right, so you have to stop and take the time to gently restore each string to its right place so the song will be beautiful again.

Jesus can restore your heart strings and make your song beautiful again. He wants to get hearts back in tune with what He says. He desires to write over your scars and have you hear what He says about them.

Sometimes, I forget His goodness. I forget that there are “streams of mercy, never ceasing.” I forget that I’m already accepted, covered, held, known, beloved. When those things are forgotten, emotional scars can reopen.

If you put two grand pianos in a room and play a note on one of them, the corresponding string in the other piano will start to vibrate. I want the note God is playing to resonate in my heart.

You can allow your scars to become a story you tell of God’s overcoming power in your life. You can let them become a testimony of how God reversed something not of Him that was trying to define you.

I read a quote that resonated with me: “It has been a beautiful fight. Still is” (from “Cornered,” by Charles Bukowski). I feel like that’s how it’s been with so many of my life experiences. Fight means to contend in battle or physical combat, to strive to overcome, to put forth a determined effort. It also means to take part in, to struggle to endure, or to gain by struggle.

Beautiful means having qualities that give great pleasure or satisfaction to see, hear, or think about. It also means delighting the senses or mind, excellent of its kind, wonderful, or very pleasing.

In Ecclesiastes 3:11, beautiful means in harmony with the whole work of God. It also means that, all things considered, it could not have been done better.

So many times we can feel like we’re in the fight of our lives, and oftentimes fights leave scars. But if it’s in His timing, then it’s in God’s perfect harmony, and that means there is no better way. We don’t have to be marred by the scars we get; we can be marked with the signature of Christ.

To console those who mourn in Zion, to give them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness; that they may be called trees of righteousness, the planting of the Lord, that He may be glorified (Isaiah 61:3 NKJV).

God wants to give you beauty for ashes. I think we often concentrate on the beauty aspect of this verse, but unless you give Him your ashes, you don’t get the beauty. There is an exchange involved here. There is a plan where you give Him your ashes and He, in return, gives you His beauty.

The definition of ashes is simply the remains of something destroyed. In other words, it is finished. Whatever the ash may be, it is done. Whatever caused your emotional scars is done. There’s no reason to continue hanging on to it. Once we give our ashes, our wounds, and our emotional scars to Him, He can start making those beautiful exchanges.A joyous blessing instead of mourning. The garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness. God was able to turn what was seemingly an ugly situation into something beautiful with the adoption of Lily. Once we had adoption on our hearts and took that leap of faith, He rewrote failure into blessing. Not only were we blessed with our daughter Lily, but we were also blessed with another pregnancy and we had our son Jude.

Then we adopted again and received the blessing of our son Jaidin. God rewrote devastating losses into abundant blessings and we began fulfilling and walking out our family’s destiny and allowing Him to write His signature on our lives. God was able to redeem those ugly moments, and He wants to redeem some ugly moments for you, too.Ask God, “What can You teach me through this,” not “What are You teaching me through this?” Don’t imply that He’s the author of the bad, because He’s not. It’s satan who comes to kill, steal, and destroy. God has come to give abundant life, with plans to prosper and to bless.

One day, Jaidin came in from playing outside, upset because some of the kids he was playing with were calling him tiny. I asked him if he had ever heard the phrase “tiny, but mighty.” He had no idea what that meant, so I explained it to him. I said, “You may be tiny, but that doesn’t change the fact that you are so brave and strong.” Honestly, that really helped change his perspective, and now he doesn’t mind being called tiny.

In fact, he now proudly says, with this little attitude that I love, “My mom told me I’m tiny, but mighty!” He doesn’t mind being called tiny now because I gave him another meaning for it. As his mom, I wanted him to see it in a positive light and pull something good from it.

We have a heavenly Father who wants to do the same thing for us whether we have been called names or whether we have called ourselves those names. God has something different in mind and He wants to put His perspective on it. He wants to write His signature upon our lives.

We are not defined by what has scarred us. We are defined by our heavenly Creator, the One who formed us in our mother’s womb.

Oh yes, you shaped me first inside, then out; you formed me in my mother’s womb. I thank you, High God—you’re breathtaking! Body and soul, I am marvelously made! I worship in adoration—what a creation! You know me inside and out, you know every bone in my body; you know exactly how I was made, bit by bit, how I was sculpted from nothing into something. Like an open book, you watched me grow from conception to birth; all the stages of my life were spread out before you, the days of my life all prepared before I’d even lived one day (Psalms 139:13-16).