What Our Scars Can Teach Us
By Sarah Fox
“Everything happens for a reason.” I grew up hating that phrase because what I heard was, “Yeah, I have no clue why this happened but I don't know what to say.” It didn't inspire hope, it left me feeling dismissed. People, unsuccessfully, used these words to try and console the internal pain caused by the visible scars on my body.
When I was seven months old, my mom had put me in a walker while she made some fresh donuts. While she put the first batch on the table and her back was turned, I promptly grabbed the cord to the fat fryer (plugged in the low-reaching outlet of our island counter) and pulled the still boiling grease down on top of me.
I've heard so many times what happened next: Mom froze in shock (she was only 23 and I was her first baby), while Dad—just entering the room—sprang into action and burned his own hands trying to run me under the tub faucet to get the grease off. They went to the nearest hospital— Dad holding the car horn down the whole time. The hospital didn't treat burn trauma and sent me to another hospital in an ambulance and no one would move out of it's way!
Over the next three months it was touch and go if I would survive. Many people’s second sacrament is Reconciliation; mine was Last Rites.
Spoiler alert––I survived. I was left with 36% of my body scarred: both legs, left arm, and left side of my abdomen. From my initial accident to age 21, I had 17 different surgeries because burn scars don’t grow as fast as the rest of your body and motion can become restricted.
Understanding my scars
When younger, I was fairly sassy about my scars. Kids at the playground would tease and I would laugh saying, “That’s the best you’ve got?” Once my little sister was being teased and since the kid wouldn’t stop after my initial attempts to defend her, I pointed to my scars and said, “You see this? If I touch you, you’ll get it tomorrow.” Not the most charitable response but, like I said, sassy!
Ultimately, things were okay until high school. Like most teenage girls, with puberty came insecurities. I started to care more about what people saw me wearing, what they said about me, if any boys liked me. I was still having surgeries during this time, which left me out of our homeschool events; I had started gaining a lot of weight from emotional eating during all my time recovering on bedrest and I had to give up dance and gymnastics. As a result, I became very isolated, losing myself in Netflix and any book I could get my hands on. And, for the first time in my life, I hated my story and I blamed God for my suffering.
How could a merciful, good, and loving God allow an innocent child to endure something that would lead to a lifetime of suffering?
I would still pray during this time but it would only be prayers of deep sadness. I would only pray the Sorrowful Mysteries and imagine uniting myself to Jesus’ sufferings. After all, didn’t He go through suffering that His Father also could have saved Him from? Jesus understood my pain even when I was convinced God the Father didn’t care.
My friends started dating and having more parties, and I felt more and more forgotten. I allowed my suffering to consume me and I ended up in a very dark place that finally led to me telling my mom that I needed help and no longer felt safe. And do you know what my beautiful mother did? She brought me to the nearest adoration chapel and said, “Tell Him about it.”
When I entered the chapel I was—thankfully—the only one in the room with Our Lord. I cried, I snotted, and I asked, “How could you let this happen to me?! I was a baby! I don’t deserve this!”
My mom brought me back to that adoration chapel every day for a whole week. By the last visit of that week, my question changed. Now I was asking, “Would you show me why this happened to me?”
A front row seat to healing
It wasn’t some big booming voice that responded but little answers here and there that I never would have noticed if I hadn’t sat at the foot of the tabernacle begging for the grace to see them.
I would wear shorts to the grocery store (I live in the south and it’s HOT) and someone would stop me and say that they had a small scar they were insecure about, but they were inspired by my courage to show my scars so boldly.
I had a little sister born with a bilateral cleft lip and palate, who would need many surgeries for the rest of her life. This, to me, was a purpose for my pain. I could understand her life. I could be the person in her family who could most relate to what she was going through.
The little signs here and there were like a balm to my heart. God my Father didn’t “make” this happen to me, but He hadn’t forgotten about me and would write straight with my life’s crooked lines.
I became confident in who I was becoming through my journey. I eventually even became a missionary, using my story as a testimony to touch the hearts of many young girls in the same dark place I had been in. That was the most beautiful thing to come from my accident: my pain and my journey with God could help others in their journey with Him. It is still my favorite thing to witness my story give hope to others. Through the difficulties in life, the Lord made me a witness to His mercy and I had a front row seat. I am blessed.
Please know that no matter your scars—internal or external—it didn’t happen for a reason but it will be used for a reason. If you’re in the depths of sorrow or pain right now, I encourage you to beg the Lord for the grace to see what good He is doing through your scars. You are not forgotten and He wants to show you.
