Scars

Scars are funny things; reminders of wounds long healed and battles won... or lost. My body is covered with them: the scar from accidentally cutting myself with a new pocket knife, from jumping on a mattress with springs uncovered, from acne, from chasing a boy, and from walking one foot on the sidewalk, one on the wet grass.

But there are fresh scars too. Scars from rapidly growing babies stretching the skin til it cracks.

A scar from the girls' chosen exit 4 inches wide and still twinging as it heals.

Excess skin hanging limply, empty of its purpose.

These scars are fresh,

tender.

Often they make me feel weak and pick at different scars; scars of the spirit which have never properly healed because I have never let the One who Heals touch those places.

I grew up in a space that crushed my spirit many times. A place of children teasing: too slow, too fat, too early in the blooming, too smart, too introverted, too nerdy, too tall, too clumsy, too sad, too loud. Was I too much? A place of grow-ups criticizing; never follows through, never small enough, never eating right, never loving right, never neat enough, never close enough, never perfect.  Would I never be enough?

It's the place where we all grew up: though each one felt it differently.

The place of wounding because others fall.

The place of seeking perfection because that is what we fell from.

Some of these places are softer than other, filled with confessing the falls, the grace extended when we fall ourselves, the celebration of each little triumph. I earnestly pray the place I help create for our daughters will be one that builds up almost as often as it crushes.

My place of crushing was not soft. Was I too much? Would I never be enough? Those answers that I sought, that we all seek, were answered in actions.  So I sought the few places where the answers could sometimes build me up: 
academics,
relationships with boys,
looking normal and sometimes pretty,
maybe even acting the part.
The rest of me was (is) raw; raw with picking at the wounds, raw from seeking validation in the wrong places, raw from not celebrating what was grace-filled and good.

And then these new scars came--the ones from gestating two little people--to tear open some old ones. Will I never be pretty enough? Will I never fit into my old pants? Am I too much, too big, to be loved?  Wounds that need to be healed, all caused from seeking the perfection I've all fallen from or the perfection expectations created by the place around me (or the sinner in me).

Not matter how hard I try, I'll never meet the expectations.

I will never be perfect.

But I am being perfected.

Being perfected when I confess to Him and to them that I am not perfect and that I have failed.

Being perfected when I renew my mind in the Truth.

Being perfected by scars.