less like scars...

(Sara Groves)


it's been a hard year,
but i'm climbing out of the rubble.
these lessons are hard
healing changes are subtle
but every day
it's...

less like tearing, more like building
less like captive, more like willing
less like breakdown, more like surrender
less like haunting, more like
remember

and i feel you here
and you're picking up the pieces
forever faithful
it seemed out of my hands, a bad situation
but you are able
and in your hands the pain and hurt
look less like scars, and more like
"character "

less like a prison, more like my room
it's less like a casket, more like a womb
less like dying, more like transcending
less like fear, less like an ending !

and i feel you here
and you're picking up the pieces
forever faithful
it seemed out of my hands, a bad situation
but you are able
and in your hands the pain and hurt
look less like scars

just a little while ago
i couldn't feel the power or the hope
i couldn't cope, i couldn't feel a thing
just a little while back
i was desperate, broken, laid out, hoping
you would come

and i need you
and i want you here
and i feel you

and i know you're here
and you're picking up the pieces
forever faithful
it seemed out of my hands, a bad, bad situation
but you are able

and in your hands the pain and hurt
look less like scars (x3)

and more like
"character"
......................

The first time I heard this song I was driving from St. Cloud to school in St. Joe. I was willing myself not to cry anymore, because I was sure I'd crash if the tears kept blinding me. I had cried a layer of salt onto my glasses until they were frosty.

I'd just been told that I was fired from my internship. I felt so broken. Like there was no way up from the blow, like the bottom had dropped out of my world, out of my hopes, out of my ability to process. I couldn't get my head above it. I had invested so much, emotionally, in that, and to lose it...worse, to lose it because of factors I didn't understand...I wasn't sure if I could ever be a viable "employee" to anyone ever again. My depression, my health, my laziness, and this loss. The whole mess had me down in its belly. And then this song came on the radio. I had to pull over, I just started sobbing. It was exactly what my heart was crying out for. It was like a hug from God!!!! I prayed that God would help me through this. I knew that I couldn't do it on my own this time. It wasn't in my hands anymore, because it was my hands who broke it so thoroughly.

Somehow, God (and I) made it through. I really didn't have much to do with it. In my turmoil, in the pain that I went through, I had my God and my friends and my teachers (those I was open and honest with) with me.

My life as a walk in the woods. There is a bright sun, and sometimes I walk through clearings, and sometimes I walk through dappled, filtered light, and sometimes full shadow. Times like now when I'm bathed in the sunlight...it's hard to believe I survive the darkness every time. When I'm in it, I can't recognize exactly how engulfing it was, how powerful it held me. It hurts to remember it too, I feel a kind of distant pity for the person I was at those times. Like it was someone else who lived then, someone I can't even recognize as "me".

Every time I hear that song, I feel blessed to be alive. That particular emotional scar, the loss of my internship, looks more like character every day.