Letting Your Scars Tell Their Story

There is an ancient story about a rabbi who had been slandered by someone in his village. A couple weeks later, this particular man had a change of heart. So he went to the rabbi and said, "Rabbi, what must I do to repair my sin?" The rabbi instructed him, "Get a pillow and go to the top of the hill outside of the village. Rip the pillow open and spread its feathers on the wind and return back to me."

The man quickly ran back to his home, grabbed the pillow from his bed, and did exactly as he was told by the rabbi.

Later, he returned to the rabbi and explained that he had done everything he was told. The rabbi then said, "There is one task remaining: go and find all of the feathers that came out of the pillow, collect them, and bring them back to me."

The man looked at the rabbi and gasped, "That's impossible!"

The rabbi, slowly lifted his eyes to meet the man's, responding to his sudden exasperation,"Yes. It is impossible for you to re-gather those feathers, just as it is impossible for you to repair the harm that your slander has worked on me."

We have this story where something happens to this rabbi and it hurts. This guy comes back and wants to fix everything and what doesn't happen is we don't see the rabbi say, "Oh, its no big deal, don't worry about it." For some reason the rabbi can't just shove this to the side. But it is more than him just choosing not to, it is that he can't. Because the rabbi understands that there are some things that can't be undone.

This is simply the reality of how the world works.

You can't put the pillow back together again.






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The summer before my senior year in college I got married. Now, apparently this was uncommon for where my wife and I were from and we often got a few funny looks when we told people our plan. It must have just been how that small sub-culture worked in that area because there was even couples we knew who were essentially in the same relational position and they even proclaimed that they were going to get married, but they all either said they were going to wait until they graduated and "settled down" or they would just put it in less poetic language and say, "We are going to wait until we get some money."

Because two students, without jobs, savings, or really anything in which to pay for the things that come with being married...I guess they typically don't get married. Which is a shame. For me it just meant getting a little adventurous in the realm of pulling it off. So that summer I embarked on a journey to take any job that I could to make as much money as I could so that hopefully by the end of each month we would have enough to pay rent. At one point I was juggling four jobs...not something I plan on doing again, but we did what it took to make it work. The most substantial of these jobs was the one I had working for my school with the official title: 'Maintenance and Landscaping'.

Basically, I cut a lot of grass.

But with extraordinary responsibilities comes an extraordinary vehicle and so for the entire summer I got to drive something that looked a bit like this:

I introduce you to the Toro. This was my vehicle, not necessarily of choice, but this is what I drove around campus for my summer working maintenance and landscaping. I know it looks kind of skimpy, but this thing could fly [Which I don't know personally. I probably just saw someone else do it or something]. So I would load up the back with lawnmowers, trimmers, gas cans, shovels, spray paint, frisbees, and whatever else might be in the shop that I thought I could use throughout that day and I would drive it around campus mowing lawns, fixing things, and generally taking a lot of breaks.

Now, one great thing about landscaping is that when it rains, there isn't a whole lot you can do and if you have lived in Ohio, you know that the chances are pretty good that it is going to rain. What would sometimes happen was that if the rain was going to be intense enough, we were aloud to go home for the rest of the day. Needless to say, I often hoped for rain.

About halfway through the summer, one of these "I hope it rains today" days came. It was a Thursday and I had called off the next day because my wife Vanessa and I were taking a long weekend for a vacation. It just so happened that while at work that Thursday morning it started to rain and since I was already in vacation mode, I was ready to call it a day of cutting grass and head home.

Little did I know, I was going to have to make another stop first.

So there is this law that says we can't drive vehicles like my Toro on the road...we have to use the sidewalk. What makes that interesting is that the Toro barely fits on the sidewalk. So on this Thursday morning I begin driving back to the shop in order to return all the equipment and go home. I was coming from the front of campus right off the single busy street that the town had and I took the first right onto the sidewalk along the main road of the university where all of the office buildings are located. As you know, all office buildings at universities have to have some sort of sophisticated look to them because this is what will entice 18 year olds to throw over $100,000 at that particular school. Evidently, there is a lot riding on how nice your buildings look. Therefore, the primary office building on this stretch is elevated a little from the sidewalk and has this wide staircase that leads up to the doors. But to take the sophistication to the elite level, the stairs have these brick walls as borders for each side up to the main landing. Resulting is that each wall juts out about one inch past the stairs on each side into the sidewalk.

Normally, the wall coming out one inch into the sidewalk wouldn't be that big of a deal, but to the unsuspecting Toro driver squeezed into an already small space in the rain...it can make things difficult.

For me, however, it turned from 'difficult' into the kind of thing you see in movies and I really wish someone would have been filming it because it probably looked pretty cool from a distance. This particular building is on my right and I was approaching the walled staircase at probably somewhere between 5-10 mph. Suddenly, just as I was passing the first wall bordering the staircase, I feel the steering wheel pull forcefully to the right. The front right tire had clipped the overhanging wall pulling the tires almost 90 degrees towards the building's direction on my right. In a different version of the story, this would have been fine if I had clipped the second wall on the other side of the staircase and just drifted into the grass, but because I hit the first wall, it left one more large piece of cement, now only a few feet away, just waiting for me and my controllable Toro as I skidded directly for it.

At this moment, the continuation of time was moving just a step up from being completely frozen and the few seconds this all took seemed to exist in slow motion. The front of the Toro hit the wall almost directly on and the beauty of momentum took my head straight for the roll cage bar. Now, if you roll the vehicle, it would be helpful to have metal bars as a sort of protection, but not so much when your unprotected head is in a pretty forceful collision with it [so much so that I later found out my head actually dented the roll cage bar. Tack that one up of hardcore things that I never want to do again]. My head whiplashed into the metal and immediately, like a pinball, I was thrown out of the vehicle through the driver's side door landing on my back a few feet away.

The unique thing about head lacerations is that the wound immediately goes numb, so you don't actually feel any pain. As I lay there wondering why I was laying there, the slow motion movie feel really began to pick up. I was on my back and I remember slowly rolling over to my stomach in order to get myself up to my knees as the objects around me seemed to have a slow blur to them like a camera with a water drop on the lens. After taking a moment to put the world around me together I began to climb up to my feet. Still numb, I looked at the vehicle smashed up against this brick wall by the stairs of the office building thinking, "I wonder if I'm going to have to pay for this?" So I started pushing the Toro away from the wall with unfelt blood streaming down my face and was only stopped by the rushing of a couple of my co-workers who apparently thought I should have been dead, and upon seeing me, must have thought I was raised to life.

It wasn't until then that I realized what happened. The commotion started, people gathered, and I was taken to the hospital [where my poor wife saw me laying there in the picture above and I wasn't really talking...imagine what kind of emotions that will bring on somebody] and after a few hours I finally got to go home looking a little different than I did that morning when I got up for work.

And apparently not too excited about it. But we did still get to go on our vacation and despite having to do some wound cleaning every few hours, we managed to have a good time.

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Sometimes, there are those things that happen to you that are beyond remembering, you just re-live them. The things where we don't look back and talk about what happened, we look back and feel and see and hear what happened. For me, this story when I wrecked the Toro, it has become a part of me. I can still feel the weight of the humid air. I can still hear the tires screech and the bang of the front end hitting the brick wall. I can still see the gray air hanging there in the midst of the wet roads.

There are some things that we go through that don't just 'happen'.

They become a part of us.

You hit a wall and get a scar. You meet someone and you can't see the world the same again. You go through that season of your life and it changes how you live and move and navigate the world.

The problem is that some things aren't that easy to own. I see a lot of people who go through some pretty serious stuff. They get rejected or betrayed. They get hurt. They enter into something and fail pretty hard. They lose someone or something and their world gets turned upside down and rather than own those things and make them a part of your life and your story we tend to try and forget them. Because if we can ignore it or pretend that it is non-existent we assume it slowly subsides and goes away and we will just keep saying, "Its not a big deal," until we've finally forgotten about it, leaving it repressed in the depths of our minds and of our souls.

Which is just as obvious as trying to put a patch over the scar on my head. Typically when someone isn't honest about their story and what makes them who they are it just becomes more and more visible. It becomes the elephant in the room that no one ever knows what to do about because you are saying you're fine and you aren't. You've chosen to ignore something that is there no matter how much you want to forget about it. It happened, its out there, and it is there for good...

...and you can't change that.

Scars can't be taken back.

Which is what the rabbi is dealing with when the man who has hurt him so badly comes and wants to make up for it.

Because it is essentially like he has a scar that can't be ignored. It is there and he just has to be honest about it and call it what it is. It isn't necessarily the rabbi choosing to hold a grudge or failing to 'get over it'. The rabbi is claiming that he has been scarred and the scar is there and there is nothing that be done about it. It is like a pillow whose feathers have been scattered all over the wilderness...you aren't going to be able to put that pillow back together. And from here, the rabbi can choose how to interact with the man and how to heal what has happened, but it starts with acknowledging that there is a wound and that something actually happened.

I completely agree with not letting things or people own you. Accepting that something has happened isn't the same as carrying a burden. Being honest that you have a scar that tells a part of your story doesn't mean you can't forgive or move in a positive direction. There is always a place to forgive, to redirect, to find something new. Suffering often leads to some of the most beautiful people I have ever met. But those people didn't have to carry their suffering, they let their suffering carry them.

Because the essence of forgiving is that you acknowledge something went wrong.

Finding a new direction after the other fell apart is based on remembering which way you went in the first place.

You can only find something new when you realize the old thing doesn't work anymore.

If you have ever been exposed to the 12 steps you know exactly how this works. "My name is ____ and I'm a _______," isn't just something you do to become a member of some particular group, it is the honest confrontation of something that actually happened and is a part of you and you've realized that instead of trying to hide it, something has to be done about it before it grows and festers under the surface eventually consuming you.

So instead of letting that thing / person / event / experience / thought own and define you...

You have to own it.

You have to start there, claiming it as your own before it claims you. The thing about scars is that they don't go away. There will always be this thing on my head that tells the story of the Toro on that rainy day. But even more so, there are all sorts of scars we have that don't have a physical manifestation on our skin. It isn't that they don't exist, they just exist somewhere else.

Because scars are just the ways our lives remind us that something happened and it has shaped you. Whether it is good or bad, enjoyable or painful, scars are the opportunities to remember whatever that particular story was and how it has become your story.

Many people just try to forget about it and pretend nothing ever happened. And there are all of these superficial cliche words of wisdom that all seem to ignore the fact that the world has this particular way of working where something happens and it becomes a part of you and it needs to be claimed. Before we can properly engage with the world, we have to learn this art of honestly engaging with all of the different scars we have and realizing that whether we like it or not, they are what makes us, us.

Which means the worst thing you could do is bury them.




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In a book called 'Genesis' there is this man named Isaac who is someone most people have heard of, but then realize that they don't really know a lot about. Which is understandable since the Bible doesn't really talk much about him. His father is Abraham, one of the most highly regarded figures of human history (being the father of monotheism) and his son is Jacob whose name was later changed to Israel and most of us recognize that name as it has become a major part of world history. Isaac's life is bookended by two of the most famous figures of not only Jewish history, but history in general.

As a result, we don't really get a lot from Isaac. In fact, he only speaks once throughout the entire story of the Bible and only appears as the central character on one occasion, but even that is shared by his bride Rebekah.

But there is one story involving Isaac that gets brought up quite a bit and that many of us have heard of. God tells Isaac's father Abraham that he needs to go and make a sacrifice and we find out that the intended sacrifice is actually going to be his long awaited son Isaac. Now, we typically cringe when we read this because we find out that Abraham doesn't contend with God once about it. He just willingly goes off to sacrifice his son...something [hopefully] many of us would never do. But in that culture, human sacrifice, especially of someone's firstborn, was a little more common. So this raises all sorts of questions about what is actually happening here beyond Abraham being willing to sacrifice his child.

There is one thing in particular happening in the story that sheds quite a bit of light on this particular way we've seen the world works. Abraham and Isaac had been journeying for several days to get up to the top of this mountain and they finally arrive to the spot where the sacrifice is going to take place and I'm sure at this point there has been all sorts of discussion between the father and son about sacrifices and how to build an altar and what their thoughts were on the cultural practice. But Isaac is helping to get everything started and has gathered the wood for the fire and he stops and looks at his father and says, "Hey wait...where is the animal for the altar?" Kind of like, hey dad aren't you missing something?

And Abraham doesn't answer him.

These are the last words we have that Isaac speaks in the Bible for the rest of his life.

Because a few moments later we find out that Abraham has Isaac binded with rope on the altar and has raised the knife in his hands to sacrifice his child. This typically gets looked at from the perspective of Abraham, willing to sacrifice his son to be obedient to God,  passing the test. But what about Isaac?

Can you imagine being forced onto this cold stone by your dad, strapped down against your will with a sacrificial knife staring you in the face? Your life about to be ended by the same man who has raised and cared for you and wholeheartedly loved you all of your short life?

Understandably, Isaac gets a pretty big scar. On the way up to the mountain we get this picture that Isaac and his father are walking together, but on the way down, Isaac doesn't return with his father. In fact, Isaac doesn't show up for three years. Apparently, he stays away.

Some of the ancient rabbis spoke of how Isaac had to leave in order to heal from the wounds his father gave him. It is almost like he isolates himself because this thing has happened and he has to properly deal with.

What is more interesting is that Isaac's name literally means 'to laugh' and in the Hebrew culture, your name wasn't just a mark of identification, your name described your identity. Isaac's life had something powerfully to do with laughter and joy and celebration...enough so that people started describing him this way.

So the fact that we don't read the name 'Isaac' in the story or hear from him for three years probably is the author trying to tell us something. The rabbis picked up on this and taught that Isaac is silent and his name isn't used because, after what has happened to him, he has to learn how to laugh again.

He is so scarred and hurt and broken that he has to rediscover his identity; pretty understandable after his father deceived him and attempted to kill him.

So we are given this picture that Isaac doesn't forget what happens to him. He is honest about it and instead of just letting it go, he begins a journey to properly deal with it.



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If someone has stabbed you in the back or was disloyal or broke your trust or actively tried to harm you, the worst thing you could do is forget about it. Instead, what needs to happen is you need to own it. To stop and say, "This thing happened and it is a part of me and I now have to do something about it."

It isn't about holding things against people or to seeking revenge or letting these things destroy you and consume your life. We simply have to be more creative in how to find healing than to just forget about what has happened. Ignorance is only bliss until it paralyzes you and keeps you from moving forward in a new, more beautiful direction.

We need to begin to be people who can own their stories and continually claim the things that happen to us, using those things to become a particular kind of person.

Instead of trying to cover all of the different scars, we have to let them show. When you meet someone, you can always tell the difference between a person who has a lot to hide and the person who is completely transparent of what has made them the person they are, whether they are proud of them or not. There is a certain strength to them. They have this worn, journeyed presence that they carry in their soul. And the only way they could get there is by choosing not to conceal the scar.

The same thing happens when a relationship gets wounded, they either have the choice to pretend like nothing happened or they can say, "This is where we went wrong and this is how we need to do things differently from here on out." They are honest about it and they use it to propel them forward. You can look at that relationship and see that they have been places, that their scars tell a story.

Because either you let things shape you or you conceal them.

But the fear of being vulnerable often leads to us trying to conceal and hide and repress all of those things that are such a central part of us. So instead of being shaped into this new person, we hide our true selves from the world.

But if the pillow has been ripped to pieces and the feathers spread on the wind, then you can't pretend that it didn't happen. We need to become the kind of people who are aware of the scars we have that everyone around us can already see. If you hit a wall, you can't hide the scar. Your only choice is to own it and let it impact your movement as you continue to work your way through the world.

Which begins by realizing that the scar isn't going away...it has a story to tell.

My hope is that you will let your scars tell their story.