“We celebrate you’d look at him and never know when perhaps God intended His light to shine through the scars. . . . When we bump up against that fence, you’d look at him and never know is challenged. What if God intends for you to look at him and know, . . to see a weakness that needs a God to hold it and move through it gently.”- Sara Hagerty
“For we who live are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our mortal flesh.”- 2 Corinthians 4:11 (ESV)
Sara Hagerty concludes Chapter 3 of The Gift of Limitations with the observation that so many people live on the surface of life, hoping to hide their scars. But those scars make us who we are. Yet, Sara states, we spend a lifetime compensating for unfulfilled dreams and gaps in our histories. When God invites us to let the old become new.
Certainly, along life’s way, each one of us experiences tiny deaths. However, Sara cautions, before we overcome, we must take care that we pause to consider, to grieve, when necessary, and to heal. Because when we fail to do so we circumvent the process.
So, when someone says of us that you’d look at him and never know, perhaps we stand a little taller. For we hold the hope that our past might become as invisible to us as it is to them. But when we bump up against the fence line, our response seems disproportionate. Or maybe our efforts to handle it fall short.
In conclusion, Sara offers these words of hope:
“The beginning of that gentle conversation — that soft unveiling when He invites us back into our stories, with His hand on our backs and His whispering assurances near — may be the end of our property lines. We stand with our toes on the line of where we cannot, no matter how hard we try, go, and He says, Come, let’s talk about a different story — the story of you, and the story of Me, in and through you.”
Today’s question: What time in your life do you believe God intended His light to shine through scars? Please share.
Tomorrow’s blog: “Brushes with God: the blueprint”
