Today while mowing the lawn in the sun, I found myself trying to pull my short shirt sleeves down to cover my upper arms. All my life I’ve avoided sunburning this part of my body. Today it hit me: why do I need to protect my upper arms and not the rest of the skin on my arms?
Out of the blue, the three inch scar on my mom’s upper arm came to mind. She has a huge chunk of flesh missing just below her shoulder because she had a melanoma when I was little. I was so young, in fact, that I don’t remember her having the life-saving surgery that scarred her.
Today, I realized that I have spent perhaps thirty-eight years protecting my upper arms because of something that happened to my mom. I don’t have a scar on my body like she does, but apparently I have a scar deep in my subconscious, and this scar actually makes me behave a certain way.
Startling…
I believe God showed me this today because this morning on the phone I had a conversation with a precious Christian friend who has some subconscious scars too. Together we prayed, asking God to show us the lies we believe and why we believe them. Lies that keep us bound to certain behaviors. Many of these lies formed when we were young. So young that we don’t remember what birthed the lie that shaped us this way.
Many of us are scared. Perhaps even badly broken like the man in John chapter 5 of the Bible who had been an invalid for thirty-eight years until Jesus came to him. “When Jesus saw him lying there and knew that he had already been there a long time, he said to him, ‘Do you want to be healed?’ The sick man answered him, ‘Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up, and while I am going another steps down before me.”
Isn’t this so like us? Giving reasons for remaining broken? Making excuses the way this man did with Jesus? We especially do this when we’ve lived with the brokenness nearly all our life.
Jesus’ response to this man does not seem sympathetic. He says, “Get up, take up your bed, and walk.”
In that instant, the man was healed. After he was healed, he did what Jesus told him to do. He took up his bed and walked. Later on, when Jesus saw this man out walking around, Jesus said to him, “See, you are well! Sin no more, that nothing worse may happen to you.”
Now that certainly wasn’t sympathetic. Sin no more… What does sin have to do with brokenness?
Actually a lot. Have you ever heard the term, “Hurting people hurt people?”
It’s true. We all know this. In our brokenness, we sin. We fear, we worry, we doubt, we get angry, we fail to love. We teach our children these same behaviors, creating a whole new generation of broken, little folks who then raise another generation of broken, little folks.
It’s like the story of the ham. A family was cooking a big, beautiful ham for Christmas. As the husband watched, the wife cut the end of the ham off and fed it to the dog. Then she tucked the rest of the ham into the pan for cooking.
“Why did you do that? That was a perfectly good piece of ham you just gave the dog.”
“My mother always does this. I’ll call and ask her why this is done,” says the wife.
On the phone, the mother tells the wife, “Well, your grandmother always does this. I’ll ask her about it.”
When eighty-eight-year-old Grandma is asked to explain her ham preparation, she says, “I’ve used the same pan all my adult life and it only fits that size ham.”
Insane, isn’t it?
Which takes us back to Jesus’ question, “Do you want to get well?”
I read a true story about a shepherd who had a beautiful sheep. The shepherd loved this particular ewe, and she produced lovely lambs that looked just like her. But she had a bad habit the old shepherd couldn’t break her of. She was always getting out. No fence could hold her and she taught each of her lambs her escape tricks. Those lambs taught other lambs how to flee the shepherd. One day, though he loved her, the old shepherd took out his knife and killed the beautiful ewe.
This story has never left me. I have six children; six lambs I’m raising for the Lord. I want to be healed because I don’t want my children covering their upper arms in the sunshine or doing something worse like the beautiful ewe. Plenty of sunscreen, yes. A broken behavior because of a hidden scar? No way.
I hope you will do this with me today: ask the Lord to shine His light on you. Pray that Jesus will reveal your scars and heal your brokenness. No more excuses. Christ doesn’t accept those. The only scars worth keeping belong to Him. Those are the ones on his nail-pierced hands.