Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls;
the most massive characters are seared with scars.
—Khalil Gibran

Scars.

I have a few. Okay, more than a few. But the two on which I am most focused are massive.

Gibran talks about “massive characters.” Me? I have a couple of really massive scars.

Several years ago, I was speaking to a group of seventeen-year-olds on how to spiritually prepare for the next step in their lives. Things were going along well. They usually did. I’m a skilled speaker and am often invited as a guest at various events. Suddenly, and without any warning, things went wrong. Very wrong.

For no explicable reason, my voice unexpectedly sounded far, far away—to me, at least—echoing, almost as though it was at the end of a very long tunnel. I felt like I was about to go under general anesthesia. I glanced down at my notes, and they were garbled—scrawled in some sort of unrecognizable text. And then I could no longer speak. To read more, click the button below.

Fast-forward twenty days. I sat on the edge of my hospital bed, tucking my underwear and pajamas into plastic grocery bags for the trip home, wondering if my life after quadruple cardiac bypass surgery and three mini-strokes (technical term: transient ischemic attacks) would ever be the same.

Fast-forward another three weeks. Back in the hospital, and surgeons opened up an eight-inch incision on my leg where E. coli had silently crept into the wounds where a vein had been “harvested” and subsequently used to patch my broken heart. Now much more was broken. This—this gaping, two-inch-wide laceration riddled with lethal bacteria—threatened to take not only my leg, but my life.

Finally, fast-forward to today. Through some incredible biological arithmetic that I can’t begin to comprehend, the incision on my chest has knitted. The holes where drainage tubes emerged from my torso have closed. The marks from stitches that held the pacing wires against my flagging heart are almost invisible. My shattered sternum has healed. And the yawning, cavernous wound on my leg—the one that couldn’t be stitched closed because it had to heal from the inside out for almost three months—is closed.

I, too, had to heal from the inside out—not just from the ravages of a cardiac event so sudden in its fury that it stunned me, but from numerous other wounds, both emotional and spiritual, that once threatened me just as literally. And in addition to the raised, red, angry scars that now mark my passage through the valley of the shadow of death, there are other scars—invisible to the eye but every bit as real—that mark my passage through injuries to my soul.

But here’s what I see as I look at those scars—both the ones I can see and the ones I can’t: every scar tells a story. And the story is this: I survived. I believe, as American writer and philosopher Elbert Hubbard penned, “God will not look you over for medals, degrees, or diplomas, but for scars.” I have those, in abundance. And for every one—both those hidden and those visible—that God has touched with His glorious finger, there is a story . . . a story that whispers of my dependence on Him and my profound gratitude that I am still standing.