Let Scars Speak Instead of Wounds

Welcome to Hope for the Caregiver here on American Family Radio.

This is Peter Rosenberger. This is the program for you as a family caregiver. Healthy caregivers make better caregivers. Hopeforthecaregiver.com. Hopeforthecaregiver.com if you want to learn more and find out more information. Hopeforthecaregiver.com if you want to register to be a part of what we're doing we'd love to have you visit, take a look around, join a Facebook group, contact me, whatever you need to do.

Hopeforthecaregiver.com. Alright I heard a great quote this week. And I told the person who shared it that I was going to steal it and I am.

It's grand larceny of material. Now I'm not applying to be the president of Harvard. to be the president of Harvard, so I'm not all that worried, actually I don't know that the president of Harvard was all that worried about taking other people's material, but that's for them to decide, not me. For the purposes of today's program, I want to share this quote and see what you think. All right, you got your pens out, you ready to take this down? Let your scars speak, not your wounds.

All right, now what does that mean? Well, one of the things that we've developed in our culture is this mentality of putting everything out there that doesn't need to be put out there. You know, you can blame it on Jerry Springer, but it actually goes back a lot further than that. But we have this, I don't know, we're not going to be able to put everything out there and I don't know, there's some kind of sick fascination with getting out there and blurting out stuff that really needs to be kept private and needs to be dealt with. And we as caregivers live with raw wounds. And the easy thing for us to do is just to bluh and just get it all out there. Well, that needs to happen, but it needs to happen in a very contained, controlled, and private place, okay?

Not out on social media. We used to have what we call Testimony Chapel when I was in Bible college many, many years ago and it became nicknamed Bragimony or Testifony. You always want to have that one individual who comes up and tries to win the contest of the most horrific story that's going on in their life or whatever and I remember being in the choir at a church and after we had prayer time with it and y'all don't tell anybody what I'm about to tell y'all because I get in a lot of trouble so y'all just keep this twixt us. But I called it Prayer Wars because no matter what prayer request was given there was always this one lady who would try to trumpet with some kind of just grotesque thing, somebody had a car accident and their leg was broken. Well, she knew somebody fell off a skyscraper and the girder pierced them through the eye and it just went on and on and I'm not, y'all don't tell anybody what I'm saying. I'm not making fun of her in the sense that, certainly I'm gonna pray for people who haven't but it was just like there was always that one upmanship of just having these things that we'd like to pray down.

It's a sick way of getting attention. There are people who have been saved from horrific things in their life and I know them. And all of us have sinned and some of us have pretty sensational sins but it's not how lurid the tale, it's how great the Savior.

And so if we're not constantly affirming the redemptive work of Christ but rather instead we're just dwelling on the sewer, then what are we doing? So when I hear that phrase, let your scars speak not your wounds, you don't wanna give a festering angry wound a microphone. It needs to be treated by professionals.

It needs to be worked on. Gracie's had a lot of wounds, we've had a lot of wound care, wound care teams and so forth that just don't wanna heal. And some of you know with diabetes and so forth, things in that nature don't wanna heal.

Gracie's had more trauma and she doesn't have diabetes, she has trauma but it's hard to get things to heal sometimes and that's when medical professionals zero in on that. They do all kinds of things to clean out the wound to make sure it's not infected or abscessed and all the things that are involved in cleaning a wound. How would you feel at church if somebody came up in front of the church and they pulled up their shirt and showed a festering wound on their abdomen or whatever? Well, it wouldn't be appropriate and yet that's what a lot of us do emotionally and we are in a culture that likes to show our festering wounds.

They don't need to be paraded, they need to be treated by trained people who can help irrigate, clean and let this wound scar over. Then once you have the scar, then you can let the scar speak because it's healed. You've dealt with it and you look back and say, you know, I remember when that was painful but it's healed now and I'm so grateful and let me tell you the healing process and I had another friend that used to tell me years ago, process the pain privately, share the process publicly. Don't process your pain out there in public.

It's not appropriate and it doesn't help anybody. You've heard me say this, some of you long-time listeners, about stand-up comedians. You can tell the ones who haven't worked through a lot of healing with some of the relationships they've had in their life and so they use their stage, they make money off of it but it's harsh, it's abrasive, it's unpleasant and that's not what we're about here. People can know that you're wounded. People can know that you are injured but they don't get to see the graphic details. I like it this way, most everybody knows that it's related to us, I guess everybody knows that Gracie is an amputee.

She's missing both of her legs below the knee. We all know that, okay, but not everybody gets to see those limbs, you understand? So let your scars speak, not your wounds. It's discretion, it's wisdom, it's discernment.

It's the core of both of those statements. Process your pain privately, share the process publicly. People need to know how to deal with the pain but they don't need to have it all paraded out there in front of them. Now, you all know that Gracie and I have a hard life. We have a very difficult life, it's not a bad life, it's just a very difficult life. Well, do you listen in to hear how hard my life is? No, you wanna hear what am I learning through this and how am I growing and how am I enduring what sustains us? That's what you wanna hear, you don't wanna hear me just sit there and talk about how painful our life is. I don't wanna hear about your sins.

I wanna hear about your redeemer. You follow me on that? And I think this is a trap we get into as caregivers because so much of what we feel is right up in front of us and it hurts all the time and it's very easy and tempting for us to just vent it all out. And we need to vent it out, it needs to come out. Every abscessed wound needs to be cleaned out, okay?

But not in front of a crowd. Needs to be done in a controlled environment by people who understand how to do it. I don't wanna go to church and have somebody come on the platform with an open, festering, infected abscess wound in front of everybody there. That needs to be done in private with professionals. But I do wanna hear from somebody who has the scars of what it's like to go through that and have it healed and what they learned through it, how they grew through it, how they were sustained through it, and more importantly, who was the professional that helped them do it? And ultimately, the professional that heals all our wounds, he heals all our diseases, is Christ. Nobody wants me to explain to them the graphic nature of Gracie's recent back surgery. But there are a lot of people who wanna know who was the surgeon?

Who was the surgeon? And that's when your scars speak because you've gotten through it. Not your wound speaking, your scars. That's when you're learning to share the process. And that's really important for us as caregivers because we do have all this trauma.

We do have a lot of graphic things that we have to deal with. But who was the surgeon? Who was the professional? Who was the doctor? Who was the counselor? Who was the pastor? Who was the savior who got you through this? That's what we need to share.

This is Peter Rosenberg, and we'll be right back. You've heard me talk about standing with hope over the years. This is the prosthetic limb ministry that Gracie envisioned after losing both of her legs. Part of that outreach is our prosthetic limb recycling program. Did you know that prosthetic limbs can be recycled?

No kidding. There is a correctional facility in Arizona that helps us recycle prosthetic limbs. And this facility is run by a group out of Nashville called CoreCivic, and we met them over 11 years ago. And they stepped in to help us with this recycling program of taking prostheses and you disassemble them. You take the knee, the foot, the pylon, the tube clamps, the adapters, the screws, the liners, the prosthetic socks, all these things we can reuse, and inmates help us do it. Before CoreCivic came along, I was sitting on the floor at our house or out in the garage when we lived in Nashville, and I had tools everywhere, limbs everywhere, and feet, boxes of them and so forth. And I was doing all this myself, and I'd make the kids help me.

And it got to be too much for me. And so I was very grateful that CoreCivic stepped up and said, look, we are always looking for faith-based programs that are interesting and that give inmates a sense of satisfaction. And we'd love to be a part of this.

And that's what they're doing. And you can see more about that at standingwithhope.com slash recycle. So please help us get the word out that we do recycle prosthetic limbs. We do arms as well, but the majority of amputations are lower limb.

And that's where the focus of Standing With Hope is. That's where Gracie's life is with her lower limb prostheses. And she's used some of her own limbs in this outreach that she's recycled. I mean, she's been an amputee for over 30 years.

So you go through a lot of legs and parts and other types of materials, and you can reuse prosthetic socks and liners if they're in good shape. All of this helps give the gift that keeps on walking. And it goes to this prison in Arizona where it's such an extraordinary ministry. Think with that, inmates volunteering for this. They want to do it.

And they've had amazing times with it. And I've had very moving conversations with the inmates that work in this program. And you can see, again, all of that at standingwithhope.com slash recycle. They're putting together a big shipment right now for us to ship over. We do this pretty regularly throughout the year as inventory rises and they need it badly in Ghana. So please go out to standingwithhope.com slash recycle and get the word out and help us do more. If you want to offset some of the shipping, you can always go to the giving page and be a part of what we're doing there.

We're purchasing material in Ghana that they have to use that can't be recycled. We're shipping over stuff that can be. And we're doing all of this to lift others up and to point them to Christ. And that's the whole purpose of everything that we do. And that is why Gracie and I continue to be standing with hope. Standingwithhope.com. Take my hand, lean on me, we will stand.