What are you doing with the scars?

We’ve all gone through ick in our lives.

We’ve had things happen to us and we’ve also done things that cause us to feel separated from God’s love.

The question is . . . what to do with it?

Do we sit in our pain and allow it to define us?

Or do we decide that we are going to charge straight into the pain and we are going to define it?

There is a familiar pattern throughout scripture . . . people doing things that separate them from God’s love (otherwise known as God’s way for their lives). They experience suffering directly related to their separation . . . then in their desperation, they cry out to God for deliverance. God hears their cry and responds in healing love, which breaks the cycle of separation and suffering. Then they receive healing. They are able to celebrate that God’s steadfast love endures forever.

What if as we confront the struggles in our lives we recognize that God’s relentless love is with us even if we reject it? Even if we aren’t there yet, the love never leaves.

What does that look like for you today?

We have to accept that it is up to us what we do with that love.

James Harnish, the author of Easter Earthquakes, writes of a friend who suffered sexual abuse early in his life. That sinful act that was done to him by someone else left a really wounded place in his friend’s life. However, through the grace and relentless love of God and years of healing therapy, although the scar of the past still remains, it no longer defines or determines who he is or how he lives.

We each can have that gift of healing from God.

We just have to make the decision to charge into the pain and allow God to take it and transform the scar into something beautiful.

Psalm 107:1

“Give thanks to the Lord because he is good,

       because his faithful love lasts forever!”