Scars

I was asked recently about a scar on the back of my left hand. I told the story of how I got it when I was fifteen years old. I had very recently gotten my learner’s permit to drive. Mama and I were at the grocery store in Huntersville, loading up that week’s haul. I had already gotten into the passenger side front seat when Mama, from the driver’s seat, asked, “Do you want to drive home?” When I grinned and nodded enthusiastically, she got out of the car to walk around while I slid across the bench seat of the 1976 Ford Granada that would, eventually, become my first car. Mama’s purse was on the seat and I somehow managed to open a pretty deep half inch gash on the back of my left hand on the purse’s zipper pull. It cut cleanly, like a razor blade. Forty-five years later, the scar still brings back that day and the excitement I felt when Mama let me drive the several miles from Food Lion to our home in Long Creek. 

The conversation got me thinking about all my other scars …

I have one on chin and one on my knee to remind me of the day a bicycle race down the hill on Pembroke Road went terribly wrong. I was pumping my feet on the pedals as fast as I possibly could, trying to beat my brother to the bottom, when my front tire dropped into a deep pothole. The bike did a reverse wheelie and I went flying over the handlebars as the rear wheel went up into the air, landing on my chin and my left knee. My brother’s eyes were as big as fifty cent pieces and he looked afraid he was in big trouble as he walked beside me, pushing both of our bikes back up the hill to the babysitter’s house. She must’ve dreaded calling my mother at work to tell her I was bleeding profusely. Mama rushed to her house, scooped me up, and took me to Dr. Seay’s office. When we were finally in the exam room the sweet country doctor began cleaning my knee in preparation for the couple of stitches he thought it needed. My five or six-year-old self asked “Don’t you want to do something about this first?” before taking my palm from my chin and feeling the cut there open like a second mouth. “Oh, yeah, I probably should,” he said, looking a little shocked at the gash that ran under my chin bone, a little right of center. (He must’ve done a great job with those stitches. The scar is still visible on my sixty-year-old chin if you are really looking for it, but not noticeable otherwise.) I think about the hundreds of competitions with my brother every time I shave my legs and notice the scar on my knee from that day.

These superficial imperfections somehow bring about good memories for me. I’ve never forgotten my excitement that first time Mama offered to let me drive despite the scar it led to, and the scars from that bike wreck remind me more of all the fun times I had racing my brother on bikes, Big Wheels, and roller skates, or butterflying the length of our backyard pool. Games of Horse. Board game and card game marathons. Carom and, later, pool games. Bowling in our teens and twenties. Everything was a competition and, though it might not have happened often given he is five years older than me, I recall the complete exhilaration of beating my brother at any competition!

That seems in stark contrast to the truth I felt when I read the following quote: “Dreaming backwards can carry a man through some dark rooms where the walls are lined with razor blades.” (Rick Bragg, All Over But the Shoutin’) I think the author of those words was referring to scars, too, only the emotional kind.

Rather than filling me with nostalgic memories like my physical scars, the emotional scars I’ve suffered are harder to look back on and appreciate for their life lessons. Though they can still sometimes fill me with pain, I am old enough now to look back on some of the worst times in my life, the deeply scarring hurts caused by mean girls and broken romances, by the loss of important people in my life due to circumstances in and out of my control or by death, and appreciate that those painful experiences are just another part of the sculpting of me … the person I am today. God at work in my life.

Truthfully, some of the best things in my life have come out of some of my worst, most scarring experiences. That’s not surprising. After all, diamonds are made from tons of pressure.

I was just telling a friend yesterday how, if it hadn’t been for a junior high mean girl experience, I would most likely not have met, dated, and ended up marrying my husband. And the best friend I lost as a result of the mean girl experience may not have ended up in Texas at the precise moment she did, reconnecting with one of our former classmates who she married and had two kids with. The mean girl who came between us set our lives on two diverging paths that, ultimately, shaped the rest of both of our lives. While it was happening, the pain seemed unbearable to the point that I felt suicidal at times. My personal mean girl isolated me from two of my best friends who had been central to my life for its entirety up to that point. I was unmoored, unhappy, vulnerable. But I didn’t give up. I nourished new friendships, first with many of the boys in our mutual friend group, then with a new girl who just happened to have been a former neighbor of my future husband. My new friendship with her, which most likely would never have happened had I still been hanging out exclusively with our old friend group, led me to that fateful night at Putt-Putt when my new bestie introduced me to Darryl. We became high school sweethearts shortly thereafter and celebrated our fortieth anniversary last June.

Some life lessons have left deep scars on my heart. It’s funny how memory works. The things I want to remember are often vague or just gone. The things I would rather forget are crystal clear, the pain associated with them so real, alive. Some things I’ve struggled to forgive and will never forget. 

There’s no one in my life that I more admired than my mother as everyone who knows me has heard time and time again. But, she did have one fatal flaw. She was not much acquainted with forgiveness. If you were her friend, you could have none better. She was the quintessential shirt-off-her-back kind of friend. But if you ever crossed her, hurt her, you were gone, banished from her life. She had not spoken to her mother in over forty years when she died. I’ve always believed that all the pain she held onto from her childhood scars was part of what killed her at sixty-one. She, literally, died of a broken heart. That behavior, the inability to forgive, is one I strive not to emulate. I truly believe: “As long as you fail to forgive an offender, you are shackled to the past. Unforgiveness keeps that pain alive. Unforgiveness never lets that wound heal, and you go through life reminding yourself of what was done to you, stirring up that pain and making yourself progressively angrier. You go through life accumulating bad feelings. Now, think about it. What’s the point of that? What’s the benefit? Unforgiveness just imprisons you in the past and robs you of the joy of living. On the other hand, forgiveness opens the door and lets the prisoner out. Forgiveness sets you free from your past. As soon as you forgive, you’re free. If you insist on remembering the offense and never forgiving it, then you allow the person to go on offending you the rest of your life.” (John MacArthur, The Masters University, Santa Clarita, CA)

The scars on my body and the scars on my heart are beautiful in a way … proof that I have lived, that I made it through some tough things. They’re reminders that I am usually stronger than I give myself credit for being.

From Scars by I Am They:

Darkest water and deepest pain

I wouldn’t trade it for anything

‘Cause my brokenness brought me to You

And these wounds are a story You’ll use

So I’m thankful for the scars

‘Cause without them I wouldn’t know Your heart

And I know they’ll always tell of who You are

So forever I am thankful for the scars