Some of you may know me well. Some of you may not. But if you had to know one thing about me, it's that I love to debate. For the past two years, I've done speech and debate with an organization called the NCFCA and I've learned and grown so much from it. But alongside debate, I've also done speech at the same tournaments. In my first year I actually went to Nationals with a partnered speech- neither of us could look, touch or communicate with the other. For my second year, we planned on doing another speech of the same type based off of a book named "The Book of (Even More) Awesome."
This plan eventually fell through, but that's not really the point. One of the portions of the book talks about cuts and bruises and how we don't appreciate how awesome they are. Pain is like your granny, it explains, reminding you not to touch things you shouldn't touch or do things you shouldn't do. But even more so, cuts and bruises are memories. I still have a scar from family camp last year. How I got the scar doesn't matter quite so much as the reminder of how much fun I had at that camp.
Well, now I have even better cuts and bruises. Once again, knowing how I got the two giant cuts on my hands, the scrapes on my arm, and the bruises on my hip are not quite as important as the memories they bring. This weekend while working media at church camp, over 100 kids between 3rd and 5th grade accepted Christ into their lives, and now I have four different scars to remember it by.
But what about the cuts and bruises you can't recover from? Gunshots. Knife cuts. Death. Maybe you've cut yourself. Maybe you've cut someone else. Or maybe nature cut them for you. What do we do with those scars? My friends, as sad as it is, memories aren't always good ones. I have amazing memories of dance floors, chandeliers and colors of the sea, but I also have memories of pain, blood and funerals. What could we ever possibly do with those memories other than, in the words of the most inspiring Disney movie, in my opinion, "Shut them out, don't let them in" and "Be the good girl [or guy] you always have to be?"
Well, just as Elsa thought the pain she caused to her sister at such a young age was something to be ashamed of, she also realized later that the same hands that caused the pain were also the same hands that could create beauty; the same hands that could create life. I'll tell you what we do with those memories. We hold onto them. Seize the day, shout out to the heavens if you must, and remember. The funerals I've gone to were covered in memories. Everything about them remembered the wonderful soul that person had. The cuts on your palms, wrists, arms and legs- let them be a lesson and a sign of the darkest part of your life. Don't be ashamed of them. Be proud that they are layovers of your past; just a shadow of the person you used to be.
At this same camp, I worked with a guy who, at first glance, seemed like a pretty strange guy. His ears had 7/10" gauges and he had quite a few visible tattoos on his body. But once I got to know him, he shared with me that his tattoos were reminders and milestones of hard parts of his life. He wore the darkest portions of his life encoded on his sleeves, always there for him to remember. How else could we live life without memories? We're not the Gladers from The Maze Runner- there's no option to just have our memories wiped clean, let alone only the bad ones. So why not make use of those dusty old experiences? Instead of letting them be dead weight, take them and mold them into something useful. Something that you can learn and grow from, not just something that tears you down.
So my question to you is this: Where are your cuts and bruises, and how much do they weigh?
This is FANTASTIC.
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