Collecting Scars

When I was young I hated grown-ups. They were always killing my fun. Telling me not to jump off that, or stop running, or wiping my face with a wet cloth. I couldn’t stand it. They were always warning me about danger at every turn, and reminding me of the boy they once knew who nearly died or ended up in hospital for the very thing I was about to try. I remember wondering to myself why grown-ups were so boring and so complicated!

Now, of course, I am older and wiser. And I get it. I get why parents want to protect their kids. I get that sometimes bad things happen. That people can get hurt, not just physically. And that life is complicated.

We all take hits along the way. In fact, if you’ve lived long enough, you’ve taken some pretty big knocks yourself. And if you haven’t collected a few scars, the truth is you haven’t really lived. The problem is not the scars themselves, the problem is if we live our lives out of those scars…

Lately I’ve begun to believe some lies. Lies about what other people think about me (or what I presume they think about me). Lies about what others expect from me, or what I expect from myself. Lies about my own capacity (or lack thereof). Lies even that I can do it by myself. When we’re  young, we get away with these lies, but if we continue to build some more thinking on top of them, then things start to get unsteady. And if we don’t uncover the lies, the  higher we build, the more painful the fall when it eventually comes.

Jesus used such a simple metaphor. “Build you house on the rock”. In other words, build your lives on truth.

What lies have you begun to believe? What lies have you believed for so long, you’ve built an entire building on it?

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