Scars

My past. Yuck. Hate it. It's funny how your life can make a one-eighty so quickly. I was thinking...why does God let you be stupid? Why does he let you make the worst possible decisions ever and sometimes even let you get away with them. This is part of a song called "Take Me As I Am" by the Sugarland. Sorry if country isn't your genre of choice, but I love it:

"They keep starin' at my tattoos.
We all live with the scars we choose.
They might hurt like hell
but they all make us stronger."

Do you ever feel like, even though you may be a different person than you were in the past, that people can see right through you? Like there's a huge tattoo on your forehead saying, "Sinner." In reality, your past is sort of like a tattoo. Like the song says, its something you choose to get, it may hurt really badly, but in the end you're a stronger person because of it. 

We all have a past. Good. Bad. Happy. Sad. There's no losing it. Sad to say, every bad thing that's ever happened, you most likely are going to remember it throughout your life. God has a reason for everything. We may not see it in the heat of a crapy situation, but God does.

There's a church called Ethos that I went to for the first time this past Sunday. Dave Clayton was speaking and he read from Genesis. He talked about the first four words of Genesis..."In the beginning God." Yeah we know that this is not the full sentence, but just think about these four words. In the beginning God. What does this mean? It means that when something horrible happens, like a loved one dying, or you flunked out of college, or you went bankrupt, God is the only one who understands you at that very moment. You may be surprised, but God isn't. He knew it would happen all along. 

I'm not saying that God wants us to suffer, because that is not the case. But He lets these kinds of things happen for a reason. He lets us choose to make stupid decisions so that we can live with them. We may not want to live with them, but maybe God wants us to do something with our scars. Maybe your scars can bring someone who just went through the same thing to God. Use your bad past for good. Rock the scars. Let your past make you stronger.