Wounded or Scarred?

It's bathing suit season.  I know, I'm not the only woman in the world to have issues with bathing suit season.   Tall and lanky isn't what most people think of when they think of bikini beauty.  But my scars make bathing suit season even more complicated.

I have a big scar from my open heart surgery.  As far as scars go, everyone tells me it's not too bad.  It healed nicely, especially when you consider that this scar was spread open during 16 hours of emergency surgery.  But it still is a big scar.  It extends from just below my collar bones to about 4 inches above my belly button, right down the center (as an interesting aside, I have an issue with v neck shirts because I always want the scar perfectly centered in the middle of the v).  The scar comes with 3 friends; 2 puncture scars from the chest tubes sit to the right and the left and about 2 inches down from the big scar, and a 5 or 6 inch scar on my right upper thigh is from the bypass tube they put in my femoral artery.  The truth is that I am embarrassed by the imperfection these scars represent.  I'm embarrassed by the reality that I needed to be fixed.  I'm embarrassed by the evidence that I am seriously flawed.

But after 16 years, I'm pretty used to the scars and sometimes I even forget that they're there.  A few years ago a store clerk said, "you had heart surgery." I was surprised and wondered how she knew--then I remembered the scar showed.   Most of the time, they're no big deal.

Sometimes I want to hide them though.  When teen girls at the beach said, "nasty, did you see her scar?"  I wanted to cover up again, pretend that I was flawless.  I think we do the same thing with our emotional scars.  We pretend they aren't there.  We hide them, we cover them, we are ashamed of the evidence of our weakness and injury.  Our society talks about being "scarred" as if it's a horrible thing.  But scars aren't the same as wounds.  A wound is fresh, easily opened, easily re-injured. Wounds need protecting and special care. A scar is a sign of healing.   It is evidence that there was a wound but it has now healed.   My scar will forever be different from the surrounding skin.  It will forever be evidence of my brokenness, but it is a brokenness that God's fingerprints are all over because he made it new.  He designed my body to grow new skin, to knit together the area that was cut open and damaged.

When we let him, he will do the same with our emotional wounds.  We don't have to be forever broken.  God can reach in and redeem even the most "nasty" things.  He can knit together torn and shattered pieces of our lives and make them new.  He needs our cooperation.  If I had just gone right back to life as usual after my surgery, I wouldn't have healed well.  It took months of special care to get to a new normal.   When I've had emotional wounds, I've needed to do the same thing.  I've needed to allow God into the pain and acknowledge that it was really there and I was actually messed up by it.  But with his special care, (and sometimes God uses a professional to help us heal) healing is a possibility. My life may not look or feel the same as it would have if the wound hadn't ever happened, but it still has healed.

How about you?  Do you have hidden wounds you need to bare before God so they can heal?   Do you have scars that are evidence of what God has brought you through?  

Giving it to God, part 3

This is part 3 of a 4 part series.  To read part 1, click here .  To read part 2, click here.

As much as I wanted to give up the idol I had made of my health and focus on God alone, it felt unattainable.  As weeks turned into months--and eventually I hit the one year anniversary of my constant headache--my weariness, fear and pain turned into anger.  The invitation to come closer seemed to be something I couldn't accept.  I wanted to, but the realization that God could heal me, he could take it all away in an instant if he wanted to, was more than I could handle.  I knew he had heard me crying out and begging for him to take this away, I knew he had seen my tears and my struggles and my fear and he wasn't fixing it.  I knew there was nowhere I could go to get away from God, (see Psalm 139:1-18) but my anger made me want to walk away from him.  I was giving my life to follow him; we had left our home in Washington, my husband had left his corporate job for full time ministry, we were living 1200 miles away from our families and friends and the return on all of that obedience was worsening health and constant pain.  I know that God owes me nothing.  I know that God made the ultimate sacrifice when he sent his son and sacrificed him for our sins. I know that scripture promises that God will never leave us or forsake us. But the knowing didn't change my feelings.  What I felt was abandonment, disregard, and total lack of concern.   And the longer I was angry the more I was sure that God wouldn't want to heal me because I wasn't showing him the reverence that he deserved.  I felt bound, held captive by this anger that I couldn't seem to let go of and the helplessness of knowing that I was the only thing keeping myself from the God that I loved more than anything.  Even on my angriest days, I still loved the Lord.  I still didn't want to try to do life without him.  I wasn't at the point of denying his existence.  But I also didn't know how to reconcile the love that I felt for God with my anger because of my lack of healing and my constant pain.  

I would like to say that I had some fantastic encounter with God that turned me around.  That somehow God showed me this divine purpose for my suffering that made every moment of pain worthwhile.  But that wasn't what happened.  Instead it was a decision.  It was as simple and as difficult as me just deciding that I couldn't go on so angry.  It was the decision to believe that God loves me more than I can ever comprehend and that if he was allowing me to be sick, I had to trust that he would use it for his glory.  So I began doing the things that I knew, the things that were the foundation of my relationship with God.  I started reading my bible, praying, participating in worship.  Most of all I started asking God to give me a new attitude.  I started asking God to heal my anger, to heal my wrong beliefs rather than my physical body.  I came to realize that God cares way more about the state of my heart (not my physical heart) than he does the state of my body.  God had been working on my healing for years and continued to invite me to look at life differently.  He asked me to develop an attitude that seeks to find the blessings instead of the problems.  As someone who leans toward being a pessimist this wasn't an easy thing.  One thing that really helped was a book that my husband gave me by Ann Voskamp called One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are.  One of the phrases she used in the book was "the beautiful ugly" which refers to finding the beauty God has blessed us with in the midst of difficulty.  As I started to list my blessings, to focus on gratitude, God began to change my heart.  He began to transform me into someone who can say that my circumstances may suck, but there are so many other things that are fantastic so I'm not going to be defined by the suckiness.  It's not a denial thing, it's not a refusal to see reality, it's choosing to believe that God really does have my best interests at heart and there is beauty in this life if I open my eyes to see it.  

Giving it to God, part 2

This is part 2 in a 4 part series.  To read Part 1, click here.

Owning my health didn't just lead me to make responsible choices, it led to major struggles with control and frustration because I never could own enough of it to fix it.  Something had to change.  

You can imagine my frustration about 4 or 5 years ago when suddenly a whole new world of challenges began. I started having severe, excruciating headaches.   As a child in 2nd grade I had been sick for 2 months with headaches that were so bad that I couldn't get out of bed.  I was ok if I was lying down, as soon as I stood up the headache came back.  They never were able to determine a cause and eventually it resolved.  Except for migraines it was a onetime occurrence.  After a solid week of constant headache, I went to the doctor.  After a few weeks with no relief they referred me to an ENT (Ear, Nose and Throat specialist) who couldn't find anything wrong.  After more time with no relief, I was referred to a neurologist.  An MRI showed Chiari Malformation so they sent me to a neurosurgeon who did more MRI's and found that my dural ectasia was severe so they couldn't treat the chiari malformation surgically.  I left with an answer of "we really have no idea what to do for you.  Just go live your life."  The neurologist tried medications which offered some relief and lots of side effects, but at least I could function.  I switched to UCSD and still the neurology department didn't really know what to do with me.  I researched on my own, I changed my diet, I adjusted my activity level, and some of it provided some relief, but nothing healed me.  

In the midst of all of this I cried out to God over and over.   I asked everyone close to me to pray.  I asked God to show me if there was some sin in my life that was causing this.  I wanted to make myself right, I wanted to fix this.  If I was blocking God's healing in my life I wanted to know and take care of it.  I confessed my lack of faith; I confessed that I knew God could heal me I just wasn't sure that he wanted to. Time went on and pain became my constant companion.   I argued with God, I was working at a church and homeschooling my kids--both things I felt God had called me to do--so how could I really be effective for him if I hurt all the time.  How could my life be a testimony if I was frustrated and exhausted and needed to lie down?  I could do so much more if he would just make me well!  I had a plan!  Why wasn't he getting on with it?

One day, as I was driving to work I was listening to tobyMac's song Made to Love You and singing along at the top of my lungs because it was one of my favorite songs.  I got to the part where it says "anything, I would give up for you, everything, I give it all away" and as I sang it, I heard a voice say very clearly "even your health?"  I was alone in my car and it wasn't an audible voice but it was loud and clear and it was a voice I knew to be God's.  Shaken, I pulled my car over to the side of the road and just sat there.   God asked me again, "Even your health?  Would you give up your health for me?"  I was stunned.  I knew God wasn't literally saying he was going to make me sick.  I want to be clear on that, I don't believe that God caused my health issues.  But I knew that God was asking me to give up the idol that I had made of my health.  My health was on this high pedestal, it was the unattainable that I was willing to change everything to achieve.  I could readily give up money, fashion, a house, but God knew that my idol was being healthy and he knew that spiritually, that wasn't good for me.  I was able to justify this idol by saying that I was being a good steward.  God said that my body was a temple of the Holy Spirit, so it was honoring God to want to make my temple the best it could be.  He was inviting me to come back to Him and Him alone, forsaking all my idols.  Could I do that for him?  Could I accept whatever came my way with my health and still honor and glorify God with my life?  Could I be sick well?  Could I live without grumbling and complaining?  Could I be joy-filled and pain-filled at the same time?  It was an invitation I wanted to accept.  It was the invitation to come closer to my savior and allow him to be enough, even as my body broke down.  But I knew it wouldn't be easy.