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, 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 blah and just get it all out there.
Well, that's that needs to happen, but it needs to happen in a very contained, controlled and private place.
OK, not, you know, out on social media.
We used to have what we call Testimony Chapel when I was in Bible College many, many years ago.
It became nicknamed Bragamony or Testifony.
You always want to have that one individual who comes up and tries to win the contest of the most horrific story.
Prayer Wars.
What Prayer Request Was Given.
There was always this one lady who would try to trumpet with some kind of just grotesque thing.
You know, somebody had a car accident and their leg was broken.
Well, she knew somebody, you know, fell off a skyscraper and the girder pierced them through the eye.
And, you know, 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 want to pray for people to have it, but it was just like there was always that one-upmanship of just having these things that we'd like to parade out.
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 scar speak, not your wounds, you don't want to give a festering, angry wound a microphone.
Okay.
It needs to be treated by professionals.
It needs to be worked on.
You know, 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 want to heal.
And some of you know with diabetes and so forth, things in that nature don't want to heal.
Gracie's had more trauma, 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.
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, you know, it's
It's harsh.
It's abrasive.
It's unpleasant.
It's, you know, 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 liken 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 want to hear what am I learning through this and how am I growing and how am I enduring?
What sustains us?
That's what you want to hear.
You don't want to hear me just sit there and talk about how painful our life is.
I don't want to hear about your sins.
I want to 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 want to 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 want to 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 him do it?
And ultimately, the professional that heals all our wounds heals all our diseases.
It's 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 want to know, who was the surgeon?
Who was the surgeon?
And that's when your scars speak because you've gotten through it.
Not your wounds 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.
