Turning Scars into Stars

I have a lot of scars for a girl. Well, I was a girl when I got them. This morning I noticed the shiny, white mark on my shin from a teeter-totter accident in first grade.  Our country school didn't have great playground equipment, and  where the T-shaped handle on my end of the see-saw had once been, there was a very large nail sticking up.  When my playmate bumped her end of the board, my leg hit the head of the nail.  The scar used to be in the middle of my shin, but it's up closer to my knee now. (Oddly, the scar I carry on my upper leg from a scrape on metal has now drifted down toward the knee!)

Then there are the scars on my feet from running barefoot and stepping on broken glass or a nail as I tried to keep up with my brothers.  The heel of my right hand bears proof of breaking my fall as I ran and skidded on the gravelly ground.  Working upward, a small scar on my neck, barely there now, reminds me of playing hide-and seek in the dark as a bigger kid and running into the clothesline!

I remember Mama dispatching an older sibling to run to a neighbor to borrow tape when I split my chin falling on the step at age 4.  The scar in my eyebrow hardly shows from some cut or fall at sometime in my childhood.  I had always disliked my full lower lip, which Mama said was from my falling and cutting it, but I think it is mostly natural, and I don't mind it now that fuller lips are in fashion!

A mashed finger from when the horse ran over me at age 5 is not really a scar anymore, but the nail was never quite the same.  Although I had a serious concussion, there were no scars that I know of.  Not even any trauma from the event, since I was knocked unconscious.  After a 3-day hospital stay I was allowed to go home and resume my reckless childhood!

Thankfully, my adult life has been mostly calm and serene, if you can call raising six kids and their various scar-producing experiences calm and serene.  The Lord has been with us through it all, thanks to our being able to trust in a Savior whose scars are the marks in his hands and feet, wounds he bore for us on the cross.  

Thomas said the now-famous words, "Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the prints of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe," John 20:25.   Jesus appeared to him eight days later and, after having Thomas see his wounds, and Thomas's proclamation of "My Lord and my God," Jesus said to him, "Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet believed," John 20:29.