your scars are beautiful to God (4)

You have a scar, you have been healed but you hide your scar. Physical scars represent a story, a moment in one's life, and they show others that there is a history & a healing. Your internal scars - invisible marks from heartbreak, mistakes & losses - also represent stories of healing & restoration. Here in this 4th instalment from the book, "Your Scars are Beautiful to God", Sharon Jaynes shows how we can allow God to use our scars.

Book Review (by Belinda Elliott of CBN.com)

Show Your Scars
Author : Sharon Jaynes

Once we are healed, the way we allow God to use our scars is by sharing them with others. Too often, Jaynes says, we hide our past hurts from people around us either because we are ashamed or because we fear rejection. Carrying these burdens around – something Jaynes compares to the dust cloud that follows Pigpen around in the Peanuts comic strip -- can limit the ways in which God is able to use us.

“I lost a child a long time ago,” Jaynes says, “and when that happened I didn’t want to talk to anybody except someone who had gone through the same thing I had. I think that is how most people feel when they have gone through a struggle.”

Perhaps the increase in the number of people seeking help from secular support groups supports this idea. “People are going anywhere and everywhere to find someone who has struggled with the same thing they have struggled with,” Jaynes says, “and it’s a little heartbreaking to think that they are having to go outside the church.”

One reason people are afraid to show their scars is because they feel that their past will disqualify them for ministry. Jaynes believes that this doesn’t happen in churches as often as one may think. And if it does ever happen to anyone, she says, they should seriously reconsider their connection with that body of believers. “If we are at a place where we share that struggle and people do not rejoice with us and with God for restoring our lives, then we need to go somewhere else,” Jaynes says.

Churches should seek to create safe places, such as Sunday School or small groups, where members can tell their stories. When that happens, Jaynes says, congregations will see a lot of healing take place.

............to be continued in part (5), the last instalment.

nothing can separate us from the love of God,
sockkim