Scarring
I have a scar on the inside of my calf where five equally spaced holes were punched. I can remember the exact place it happened. Every time I see these scars, I can picture the bike. I can picture the trail. I can picture being in the back of the group of friends as they rode off not knowing that the chain had fallen off my bike and when my foot slipped these sharp metal teeth dug into the inner side of my leg. I can even sort of feel that same pain as I looked down and saw that for some reason these five holes weren’t bleeding yet, just sort of traumatized holes.
Now, this wasn’t some awful bike accident. It wasn’t something that left me permanently injured and obviously didn’t take my life. I don’t think about it daily or anything like that. I’ve had hundreds of other bike crashes in my life. Some worse and some not as bad, but the scarring always reminds me of this one particular crash.
This morning I started thinking about the way that we interact as people and how sometimes the things that we do can sometimes cut someone so deep that no matter what happens we’ve left a scar. A scar that will always be there. They may forgive, they may not think about it every day, but on the off chance that something causes them to look at that scar, even the smell in the air when they were hurt comes flooding back to them and they can immediately identify with the moment they were hurt.
Now, I know Biblically we are supposed to forgive seven-trillion times or whatever, but I’m curious what your thoughts are on the scars. What do you do when something causes you to revisit that moment of pain and there’s nothing you can do but be reminded of the moment those scars showed up? Have you truly forgiven if these scars aren’t gone? What if someone has wounded you so deeply that you’re not sure you can ever fully recover? What do you do with the scarring?
Just some light Friday thoughts for you. Ready? Go.
“Don’t Worry, It Won’t Hurt At All”
Blue has a wart on the bottom of his foot. I’ve never had one so I don’t really know what to do with them but the other day Kristin got some of that stuff that is supposed to freeze them off with no pain or “discomfort”. I mean they sell this stuff over the counter, how bad can it be right?
So, we sit Blue down and tell him that he won’t feel anything and just to hold still so we didn’t get this weird freezing stuff all over the place. Kristin dips this thing into a cartridge thing and pulls out this smoking, giant, Q-Tip looking thing. It wasn’t instant, but about five seconds in to the forty-second process Blue started squirming around and saying that it was ‘hurting real bad’. Now, normally he’s a pretty tough kid when it comes to playing outside with friends, but he’ll have a heart attack if we try to do anything ‘medical’ on him. I think it’s a control thing, but he swears to me that it hurts. So he makes it through the whole forty-second process and is now completely upset at us for putting him through such a procedure. I mean the box says “painless” so it can’t hurt that bad right?
In an attempt to make things fair, I asked Blue if he’d feel better if I did it to myself too. He agreed that I should try it so Kristin did the same process on me, only on the back of my hand and without the wart. Instantly I felt like that scene on Fight Club where Brad Pitt pours acid all over Edward Norton’s hand and makes him stare at it to cope with some inner pain or something. That thing burned like nothing I have ever felt before. I waited the entire forty-seconds and tried to show Blue how brave I was and how it wasn’t really that bad, but also letting him know that I understood the pain that he was talking about…. then I ran to the bathroom crying. No, not really, but that picture above is the result now three days later. Yesterday the blister popped and today it’s just this open sore thing on the back of my hand.
I’m not sure if there’s a moral to this story or not. All I know is my hand is jacked form some painless thing that I’m sure somewhere on the box says “don’t put on normal skin, dummy”. But Blue felt better about things, so I guess it was worth it.
