Show Me Your Scars

If you play “connect the dots” with the scars across my belly and hip, you can draw a turtle.

A collection of silvery lines are the only remains of five surgeries. These now-painless marks are tangible evidence of past healing.

I have invisible scars too - remnants of emotional wounds that were far more painful than joints being repaired or organs and babies being cut from my body.

And today, unwelcome aches in my heart are still crying out for healing – deep unseen wounds that wish they were already scars. Maybe you have some of those too?

Hope is ours because Jesus has scars too.

Though we might expect a perfected body to no longer bear the marks of suffering in this world, in His resurrected body, Jesus has scars. Scars were the key to confirming His identity to His disciples. Only when they saw His scars did they recognize Him.

His tangible marks of suffering now exist not as defects, but as a witness to the glory of God – an eternal proclamation of the pain He bore for your sin and mine. In holy perfection, Jesus’ pain is remembered by His scars.

Perhaps the marks of our own agonizing wounds in this life will remain in heaven as permanent scarred testimonies of the glory of God?

While things still ache, this assurance of unwasted pain brings real hope.

Because of the scars Jesus will bear forever, you and I can be sure that whatever hurts today will one day be a beautiful scar that identifies us as those who have suffered with Jesus.