Wounds, Scars, and the Futility of Scab Picking

Ever have something happen to you that you just can’t seem to get over?

Maybe it’s been a recent event; maybe it happened years ago.  But whenever and whatever it was, it still hurts when you think about it.

Forgiving the person who did you wrong is a challenge.  Tears that you’re trying so hard to hold back sting your eyes as you try to hold it together remembering the situation.

And maybe you HAVE made progress.  Maybe your every thought doesn’t somehow work its way back to that event, or that person, or that time.  Maybe the pain isn’t as intense as before, the duration of your heart hurting not as long as before.

Why is it so hard?

It’s hard because it HURT.  Because what you went through was terrible.  Hurtful.  Not fair.  Totally unexpected.  Turned your whole life and your way of looking at the world upside down.

The thing that you never thought would happen, happened.

OK, so it did.

“Time heals all wounds,” people tell you.  Yet, it doesn’t seem to.  It has been “long enough”.  And it still hurts like it happened just this morning.

You want more than anything to be able to let it go, and feel better.  Make the pain go away.

Or do you?

Confession time.  I pick scabs.  If I have a bug bite, or a cut or scrape, or some dry skin – I will pick it. Every day.  Even if it hurts. If there is a piece of uneven, dry skin, or a scab, I’m there.  And skin that’s peeling after a sunburn?  That’s the best!

There’s even a term for this habit – dermatillomania.   You say “obsession”, I say “bad habit”…  This is considered a form of self harm, an OCD type thing.  But for me, it’s not about feeling “alive” because of the pain picking causes.  I feel alive already, and am a fairly happy and optimistic person.  For me, it’s something I enjoy doing (really?? Yes…), and I do it when I’m bored.  Like when I’m reading at the end of the day, or cruising the internet.  I’ll sit there and pick at my fingers, or on a bug bite, or even on the dry skin on my feet.

Keeping my fingernails short doesn’t fix the problem.  I’ll find a way.   It’s a life-long habit, and one that sometimes leaves me with nasty looking skin that embarrasses me.    Sometimes I pick so much my feet bleed.  And still I do it.

Why am I telling you this?

I pick physical scabs, yes, but I also pick emotional scabs.  I bet many of you pick emotional scabs, too.

A few years ago, a group of us went through a 10-week Beth Moore study called “Living Beyond Yourself:  Exploring the Fruit of the Spirit”.  Beth Moore did what Beth Moore does, which is share deep, Biblical, real, thought-provoking, humorous, and encouraging lessons.  She is gifted and amazing.  I want to be Beth Moore when I grow up.

In this video series, Beth shared things that I hadn’t thought of before, and said some things in a different way that brought new life to those ideas for me.  Status quo for a Beth Moore study!

And then we hit the Session 9 Group Session video and I was so grabbed by what she was saying that I could barely breathe.

Session 9’s topic was “Gentleness”, one of the fruits of the Spirit.  Seems harmless enough, right?  I think I’m pretty gentle.

Never in a million years did I think she would take this topic in the direction she went and end up  schooling me in an area I sorely needed to be confronted on.

Beth talked about the difference between scars and wounds, and why we continue to be so hurt by the past.

Here’s a quote from Beth:

“Whenever we find our anger bubbling up in ways that are disproportionate to the situation at hand, it is likely that that anger comes from WOUNDS that we are still carrying around, wounds that we have not allowed our Father to bind up, so that they can heal.  We hold onto these things as if our life depended on it.  It seems we want to hold onto that pain and that resentment and that anger we feel towards whomever has hurt us, because we haven’t really forgiven and don’t particularly want to.  We keep picking at that scab.

If you touch an open wound it HURTS! And we bleed all over the people who have touched it. But if we spend time alone with God, pour out our hearts and our hurts to Him, in humility let go of that hurt, and allow Him to clean out the wound and bind it up, then a SCAR can form. It doesn’t hurt to touch a scar.  The scar will allow us to show the healed place to others (just as Jesus showed His scars to Thomas), and give those suffering from a similar wound, HOPE.”

Why do I keep picking?  It must be because I WANT TO.  Even though I would never admit that.

Picking at the scab?  What’s she talking about here?

She’s talking about rereading those old emails that just bring the hurt back full-force.

She’s talking about reading those journal entries from when you were 12 that bring it all back like it was happening again.

She’s talking about sneaking looks at that person’s page on Facebook, and stoking the fire of our righteous indignation at how horribly wrong that person treated us.

She’s talking about having every conversation you have with your best friend wind its way around to THIS PAINFUL TOPIC, and then parking there for an hour.  Or a day.

She’s talking about blaming everything that goes wrong in our lives on the abuse we suffered 20 or 30 or 60 years ago.  Saying that we’ll never be able to do X or Y or Z because that situation was so damaging, and well, “how can I be expected to be normal?”.

She’s talking about playing “your song” over and over 10 years later and feeling like you can never be happy because he left you on your wedding day and you thought everything was fine.

She’s talking about refusing to forgive that person who hurt you, because you have every right to be angry.

And yeah, I’ve been guilty of doing some of those things.

Not being willing to totally LET GO so that God CAN bind the wound.    Let.It.Go

Until I am willing to let it go, give up my “right” to be righteously indignant about this thing – it’s like picking a scab that you can’t leave alone.  It won’t heal this way.  It will continue to hurt and get in the way of living fully.

Maybe you say “Well I can’t forget what happened.”  You’re right.  You can’t forget it.  But as long as you hold on to the anger and resentment and pain and the need to get even and the desire to have closure that you’ll never get and your excuse to stay miserable – you will continue to have a bloody, picked at wound that doesn’t even look all that much like it did when the wound was created.  You make it worse because now it is festering.  Draining. Unsightly.  Maybe infected.  Certainly painful.

Hearing what Beth said in that lesson was like a slap in the face for me.  A good slap in the face. Because I’ve done those things.  How did she know??  I thought I WAS doing the right things in getting over hurtful events from my past.  Beth’s message helped me to understand why those things still sometimes hurt so much.

And it wasn’t entirely because of what those other people had done to me – it was because of ME.

Don’t get me wrong – people did do terrible things to me, treat me as if I didn’t matter.  That wasn’t my fault or my responsibility.  What IS my responsibility is what I do with that now.

Do I let past hurts limit my ability to experience joy in my life, or do I find a way to move past those hurts?

I get to choose.  You get to choose.

Are you an angry person?  Do you seem to react way out of proportion to the situation at hand?  It’s likely that you have some kind of old wound that you haven’t allowed God to bind up and heal.

Ignoring the wound doesn’t make it go away.  It just shoves it down deeper.  Some people are good at pretending like it was no big deal.  But it was a big deal, and it will work its way to the surface until you pay attention to the root of the problem.

Somehow we feel it’s our right to refuse to accept the reality of what happened.  We feel entitled to hang on to bitterness, anger, resentment, and a desire for revenge.  Our right not to forgive.

And I guess it is your “right” to do that.  It’s just a really miserable choice to make.

But you do get to choose.

Can you see how miserable we make ourselves?

In order to get past the hard things, you have to be willing to submit to God’s will for your life.  Yes, there’s that “s” word that we dislike so much.  We don’t like to submit in general, and we really don’t like it when submitting means giving up something we desperately want.  Or at least giving up the idea of something we want, since the pain we feel is most likely a result of NOT having what we thought we would die without.

So again, you have a choice.

You can’t change what has happened.  You can’t go back and unhappen it.  The choice is in what you do NOW.  Where you go from here.

“He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds.”   ~   Psalm 147:3

The Hebrew word for “bind up” is “habas”, which means to wrap around, to cover, to envelope.  Think about God enveloping you and your wounded spirit.  It’s a powerful visual.

We have wounds that we’ve never let God bind up, and so there are situations that have never healed.

Beth explained that this whole process of allowing God to BIND the wound takes … time.  Which we already think we don’t have enough of.  We don’t slow down long enough to allow God to work with us, bind our wounds, and heal us spiritually and emotionally.

It takes time.  And during that time, we have a lot to learn.  You can’t learn deep, meaningful, maturing lessons if you try to rush things.  A broken bone or a surgical incision – what happens if you take the binding off too soon?  A lot of things can happen, none of them good.

“He says, ‘Be still, and know that I am God’ ”     ~    Psalm 46:10

Sloooowwwwww  downnnnnn.

Healing takes time.

We are all a bit stubborn.  I’m a Taurus, and I am pretty much the poster child for stubborn.  We know that we can’t change what has happened, but we stubbornly refuse to accept it.  So, we make our own misery.  It sounds ridiculous on paper, doesn’t it?  But we do it.

“When something touches you in a place where you have been hurt before and it still hurts, you don’t have scars…..you have wounds”, Beth Moore writes.

If you have an old wound that’s still raw and painful every time a reminder creeps up – you’re probably still picking the scab.

Scars don’t hurt, but they do serve as reminders of what caused the pain.  If your actions or attitude or poor choices played a role in causing that wound, look at that scar, touch that scar, remember the pain, and decide not to do that again.  Learn from the scar.

SCARS don’t hurt.  WOUNDS do.  Decide to let God bind and heal your wounds.