Scars are ugly. Bound up flesh. Yesterday’s wounds. And it’s never the little wounds that leave their mark on us. It’s the big ones, deep, searing, painful. Scars are reminders of pain, they leave their stigma on us forever, a constant whisper of what wounded us in the first place. Sometimes we listen to that whisper to the point where we allow it to paralyze us to ever experiencing what caused us to be wounded, good or bad. We don’t want to go back, we don’t want to be wounded again, and so in trying to avoid going backwards, we cease to move forwards.
And yet… a scar is a symbol of victory. It isn’t a wound anymore. It has healed, and yes you will always remember, but the wound, the pain, is gone. If we allow ourselves to move forward, scars can be our teachers. They remind us of what hurt us but they also remind us of a battle won. We did not allow our pain to linger, we healed and moved forward in spite of the pain. We are no longer the wounded, we are the healed.
Some scars are more important to us than we can ever know. Christ was wounded for us. His scars are our victory. He went through the pain, the agony no innocent man should have been through, so we didn’t have to. Just like Thomas we can reach out our hands and know His scars and we can believe. And His scars are our reminder of victory: victory over death, victory over sin, victory into life. All our wounds, all our pain, are bound up in this one man, God-made-flesh, and we are no longer the wounded.
We are the healed.
Fellow Imitators of God 