Scars and Secrets (Part One)

I know men are not supposed to dwell too much on their physical appearance, lest they become suspicious to their surrounding friendship network. I need to confess that lately I’ve been thinking about my physical appearance. I’m not talking about my receding hair-line, or my height, or the teeth that bare the reality that I chose not to wear my retainer after the braces came off in middle school.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about a few of the physical scars I carry.

I have two identical scars on my forehead—the result of two completely different events. Some people tell me that if you get close enough, it looks as if I used to have horns growing out of my head. Had I participated in the political drama many Christians fueled, the horns might have come literally true.

One of the scars on my head came from a running accident when I was two. Not being the polished athlete I am today, I ran into the corner of a brick wall.

The other scar is from a time when I was five living in Wichita, Kansas. I was at the mall with my next door neighbor who challenged me to a race. I took off at Michael Phelps type speed, and he decided his best chance to beat me was to trip me from behind. I went falling into a sharp indoor street lamp. The next thing I knew, I was laying in the ER, face-up, staring into a bright light with a doctor holding stitches, analyzing my grill.

I should note that these scars used to be separate. In pictures from adolescence, they are on opposite sides of my forehead. But as I’ve grown older, these two scars have decided they need to be closer. Hence, the horns.

Another scar I am aware of is the one located just beneath my chin. This scar was given to me by one of teammates on my college basketball team. It was innocent enough. We were doing a routine drill when he accidentally elbowed me right beneath the chin. My screen went black. Again, the next thing I knew, Garth Pleasant (the coach) was standing over me as I stared at the ceiling, saying, “Graves, Graves, Graves.” That was the first and last time I’ve ever been knocked out.

I also have a scar on my side that I’ve had since childbirth. You don’t have to be a M.D. to know this is known as a birth-mark. One of the eerie things that happened to me in college was the time I discovered that my roommate and best friend had an identical mark in the exact location. If the Apocalypse was upon us, we surely bore the mark of the beast.

I’m starting to believe that scars are incredibly important in our journey as people of deep spirituality. Not just physical scars we can detect with the eye, but the spiritual scars we carry with us.

For one, scars remind us that we are all fragile people. Even the toughest, macho-men must remember that from dust we came and to dust we shall return. None of us are as invincible as we convince ourselves. We might live a little longer, but the fragility of being human waits each day as we enter into the world.

I will never forget the dramatic reminder of this I received my sophomore year of college. I was in the weight room at Lipscomb University in Nashville. A teammate and I were lifting weights, getting ready for the Big Game the next night. There was only one other person in the weight room—a young athletic girl. We learned later she was a volleyball player. After we left the weight room, she started to feel ill. She went to her dorm room to lie down. During the night she became deathly ill. She died from meningitis. Just like that . . . a young athletic twenty-something dead.

Our scars remind us of our inescapable fragility.

Scars also remind us of a truth that holds the universe together. Some of the events and experiences of our lives are the result of our choices. Yet, some of the events and experiences of our lives are the results of choices other people made. If the statistics are correct, many of the women in our churches have experienced some form of sexual molestation. I realize that’s not taboo to talk about but if we don’t who will?

Scars are also significant, because immediately beneath the scars are the secrets we keep from one another. Underneath the surface, when he dig deeper and become fully transparent: we have to deal with the generational sins that haunt us: alcohol and drug addiction, physical and sexual abuse, pornography, sexual addiction, anorexia and bulimia, lying . . . and the list spreads as far as the veins in the human body (if you doubt . . . check out this site which is closing in on 200 million hits).

I just mentioned personal scars . . . but societal scars can also be detected in all of us: ageism, sexism, racism, classism . . . all of these are part of our experience.

Physical scars . . . spiritual scars . . . going deeper, we’re reminded of the secrets that rage below the surface. These secrets that sit right below the surface of our scars have the potential to destroy us. They are, like skin cancer, absolutely toxic if we do not open ourselves up for treatment.