The Distillery Church

Scar Stories

So there was this one Summer when I was fourteen that I remember very vividly because of the skateboard accident.

I was young and kind of headstrong and determined back then and pretty much thought I was invincible. I was in Southern California visiting my cousin Sandy at the time who was older and married. The two of them had a little girl (my second cousin Brandy).

My cousin Roy, Sandy’s brother came along with me form Houston, Texas for the visit. He brought along a plastic red colored skateboard. I decided after a few tries down the street that I could ride the thing.

So I took it for a spin one day down the residential street and around the corner in their suburban neighborhood. It handled pretty well and as it turned out this road was a pretty good place to test it out. This neighborhood was built in the hills near Oceanside and all the roads either were up an incline or down one.

After several passes of this one particular street with what looked like a sudden 45 degree drop I decided to just throw myself down the road on the skateboard to see if I could successfully maneuver the right turn at the bottom of the hill.

Well as you may have guessed something went terribly wrong. I got about a block into the decline and I noticed that the board was beginning to get incredibly wobbly. It was shaking below my feet and it became a challenge just trying to stay on top of the thing as the two of us picked up speed down the hill.

Halfway down I got scared that I was going to have a serious crash and decided to just stop. My method of halting was to jump off the board and reach down and grab it off the street before it got away from me.

This method was just fine when coasting at a moderate rate of speed on a flat surface with no real incline, but there were a few factors that contributed to what would soon ensue.

I was traveling down the incline at about 35 miles per hour. I was descending a rather steep hill. I was inexperienced on a skateboard. The skateboard I was on cost about ten bucks at Kmart.

Needless to say, I crashed. I jumped off the board and reached down in one fluid motion but since I was going so fast my feet never landed solidly on the ground. They flew out behind me and since my hands were out in front of me they hit the ground first.

I slid down the hill on my elbows and hands and knees for several feet not slowing down at all. The downward momentum of the hill and the speed at which I was going caused the asphalt to really dig in shredding most of the skin from my elbows and knees.

The pain was excruciating and so I decided to roll a bit to take the pressure off of them. I rolled forward onto my right shoulder thinking I would be propped up into a standing position and be able to escape my fate. Unfortunately my shoulder dug into the asphalt a bit more than I expected.

Soon I arrived at the end of the descent and that is when I was able to plant my feet and stand up just in time to take the guard rail at the end of the road with my rib cage. The guard rail was just high enough to catch my lower ribs, it was not high enough to stop me from falling over the cliff that was on the other side of the guard rail.

It was a twelve to fifteen foot fall to the beach and the next thing I knew I was lying on my back in sand bleeding from just about every part of my body and the skateboard was nowhere to be found. My clothes were all shredded where the road rash had occurred. No one was around to see me fall or see me in my current state.

After a few moments of lying stunned in the sand, I sat up, then stood up amazed I had not broken a bone or two, shook off the pain, then walked back to Sandy’s house. I remember having a lot of pain and discomfort during the recovery time that summer, but what seemed worse for me at the time was telling the story to everyone that I met. It was embarrassing. But everyone would ask because I was pretty banged up and lost a lot of skin.

It took the summer and the rest of that year to grow back all of the skin I had lost and even then there were obvious scars left on my knees and elbows, and back. I never rode a skateboard again. I learned that summer that I most certainly was not invincible. I could be hurt. I could have died. In my fast fall to the beach I flew over a metal staircase descending the cliff side. If I landed on those stairs who knows how that would have ended up. Instead I jettisoned over them missing the steel and concrete and landing on the soft sand. So many things could have happened that didn’t. In a way I was saved from a much worse fate.

Scar Stories

What got me thinking about this story was the memory of something that happened a few years later while I was hanging out with some friends from school. Joe and I were 15 and John had just turned 16. We were all talking about stupid shit we had done in our lives like the time that Joe crashed his motorcycle, and the time that John broke a window with his hand. I talked about the skateboard crash and as guys tend to do at times each story was preceded by revealing one scar or another.

If someone had been observing our conversation from afar it would seem like these three guys were anxiously showing certain body parts to each other. One would pull up his sleeve while the other pull up a pant leg, still another pulling off his shirt and turning while the other two stare intently at a spot on his shoulder.

With each blemish or long thin line in our skin we had a story to tell. I learned that John had been in a very serious incident at a race track when during a race a car crashed in front of the place where he was sitting. Glass and metal flew at him nearly shredding his arm and he did have the worst scars to prove it.

From that point onward I made sure that if I were ever going to a race, I would not choose a place close to the track unless it were well protected. I would never let my kids do that either. After sharing our stories and showing the scars they left the three of us became an inseparable force to be reckoned with. Some of those stories were about stupid shit we did and others were about stuff that was done to us, like the scar left from a cigarette by Joe’s stepdad.

The reason I was thinking about this story today is because I woke up with the sudden realization that people who are in community need to share there “scar stories.” I am not talking about just the physical scars and where they came from, but even the deep emotional ones. If there is ever a safe place to talk about these things it should be church. Our tendency however is to go to church and spend the next couple of hours hiding the scar stories and pretending that everything is okay and has always been okay.

We generally don’t have a problem listening to other people’s stories and shaking our heads and offering to pray for them, but god forbid we show signs of weakness. There is a story in the Gospels of the disciple Thomas becoming a true believer when after Jesus’ death and resurrection he meets Thomas and “shows him his scars.”

So as followers of Jesus I believe that it is our duty to show each other our scars. Not to revel in our misery or take pride in our adventures getting them, but to look at one another and say “see, I am like you.”. We all have scars. Maybe they are there for a reason. Maybe they are there to tell the stories we refuse to tell others or even ourselves.

What does emotional and relational scarring look like?

Sarah, is one of those people that never can have a prolonged relationship or friendship with other women. For some reason she has always connected with men in that way. She doesn’t really like other women that much and thinks that they never really understand her or get what it is she is saying when she has tried to connect with other women. Men just seem to make better friends and so at this point in her life she has not even tried to start relationships with other women.

As a child Sarah grew up with a Mom and a Dad in the home. She had everything a girl could want growing up – a nice home, plenty of toys and dolls and dresses and stuff, even a room of her own. Her dad adored her and spent as much time with her as his 12 hour a day job would afford. She grew up with an older brother and a younger sister. Her mother, Tina was a stay-at-home Mom and had all of the time in the world to spend with her and show her love, but Sarah never really felt loved by her.

Tina would deliberately make phone calls to brag about her son, but rarely mentioned Sarah unless she was upset with her. Tina even seemed to adore Sarah’s sister, and so it was not a gender issue. In Sarah’s mind her Mom just did not like her very much. As a child Sarah would do obnoxious things to get her Moms attention, but her Mom seemed dismissive at best to her pleas. By the time Sarah is a teenager, she no longer cares about getting any kind of attention from her Mom. She has given up on trying to demand love from her Mom and in a sense has written off her Mom in that area of her life.

To her this is no big deal, but in her something strange is happening. Not only has she convinced herself that attention and love from her Mom is not necessary for happiness, she has projected those feelings on all women. This is her scar. The sad truth about this is that Sarah may not even see the scar. The good news is that we in community may see her scar if she were in our circle. Maybe we suffer from the same wounding and have learned from our mistakes how to forgive our Moms and move on in life loving others correctly.

True Community

When we begin to share our scars stories, we help people to see their own scars. We reveal something in them that has remained hidden for years possibly. We turn the lights on so to speak, and others may then be healed in the light. This sort of thing yields true friendships based on reality, not on how I want to look to you, but who I truly am before you. True community success can only occur when we are our real selves before others and we still feel loved by them.

This kind of church success is not the kind you hear about, but it is more important than how many people walk through the door or whether the bills are paid on the building, or whether or not anyone has been baptized or saved. Don’t you think?