Scars

Last Friday Stacy and I had a plan. The plan was that Hannah, who didn't take a nap that day (which was part of the plan) would eat dinner and go to bed early. Stacy and I would eat some cheese and sausages and other yummy treats that I had purchased earlier in the day at the new HEB Alton Market on NW Military to hold us over and have tortilla crusted tilapia (from Costco...muy excellente) with some corn poblano soup from the same market after Hannah went to bed.

Well....at 6:10pm precisely our plans changed. That's when, as I was preparing our cheese, sausage, etc., in an attempt remove the wax from the cheese so I could slice more I instead sliced my finger. The index finger on my left hand. To the bone. OUCH! Bleeding. A LOT of bleeding. Stacy arrived a half hour later to me sitting on the floor in the middle of the living room, apparently quite pale. Makes sense because I was sitting there so it would be a shorter distance to the floor when I passed out, which is the direction I was leaning in.

So, instead our one last quiet evening at home before our Mongolian guests arrived was spent at the Texas Med Clinic with Hannah having a complete meltdown (now its no nap AND 2 hours past bedtime) when she had to go to the bathroom and changed her mine (my theory...they have the "hair dryer" hand dryers, which she likes not so much). Luckily I did not hit a tendon and SIX stitches later we were home. Ate the cheese, sausages, etc., which Stacy properly stored when he went home to drop off the things he had bought at Lowe's in attempt to kill two birds with one stone (occupy Hannah and check something off his to do list). Skipped the fish and went right for the soup.

Yesterday the doctor removed the stitches. Then he told me that in a week I should start putting Mederma on my finger four times a day and I would not have a scar. But, what if I want a scar? Are scars always bad? Now...I know that there are terrible scars that people can suffer that should be fixed to normalize their lives. But, for most of us, scars are what make us human. Scars are also the opportunity for us to show the grace of God in our lives. Now I'm not talking about only physical scars but the emotional ones we all have. Sometimes we are ashamed of them. Sometimes we are embarrassed by our scars. Sometimes we spread "mederma" on them, which hides them on the outside, but we still know that they are there.

Maybe I want to keep my scar to remind me of the correct way to hold a knife and the safe way to cut cheese, and the consequences when I take a short cut. Hopefully, when the moments were right, I was brave enough to share my emotional scars and reminded someone else of the healing that comes only through the grace of our heavenly Father and the love of His Son and my saviour, Jesus Christ.