Suffering is a sacred meeting place between two worlds—one of spirit and one of flesh. Suffering is the familiar common ground where broken hearted Christians say to a broken-hearted world, “me too.”
Simply put, pain is the language everyone understands and where a Savior’s love is best understood.
Dear friends, never reduce your scars to mere pain. There is so much more at stake than the conflict that hurt you. God is redeeming what this world has done to you but it’s going to leave a mark—a scar. But herein lies the beauty in the ashes: scars were meant to mark more than your skin— they mark the very spot you got up and didn’t stay down. They mark where this world cast you down but also mark where God would not let you be destroyed. Scars mark the place where you survived it and where God changed you by the experience of it. That is the secret of scars my friends! And here’s another: what has marked you so deeply will call to others. Do you understand that? Deep calls to deep. Something deep within you calls from the places that have bled to others who are bleeding.
It is there that heaven’s scars tend to earth’s wounded, in that most vulnerable but sacred of meeting places…the place of “me too.”
Church, don’t be so quick to hide your scars. Life is remarkably hard, but sometimes people need to hear God’s love speak to them in the only words that broken hearts can understand…“me too.”
2 Corinthians 1:3-4
“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God.”
—ESV
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