The Truth About Scars

When I was a preteen I spent most of my time swinging. After school? Right out to the backyard. Snowing? Raining? One hundred degrees? Who cares! I would take my pink iPod Nano and listen to music and swing for hours. Usually during that time I would plot my books, which is something that I always do easier to music.

Nothing weird had really happened before. There were a couple of times when a chain would break and I would fall to the ground. But I never got seriously hurt, and it never made me stop swinging.

So one day in the summer before seventh grade we had something going on that night, with a few friends. I had been looking forward to it ever since I found out about it, and finally it was the night. I couldn't be anymore excited. But we still weren't leaving for four hours and mom was in the shower....so guess what I did? I went out and swung, just like I had any other day. I swung on the one at the end which had always gone at a weird angle. You couldn't go as high on that one, but I think the chains that broken on the others and we were in the process of fixing them.

I turned on my music and begin doing what I always did. But the swing lurched weird. Not like it hasn't happened before, I thought. But this time it was different It lurched again, but this time  both chains snapped and I fell on the ground.

I didn't know what was happening. All I saw was splintered wood falling. There was intense pain in my right leg.

When everything stopped spinning I evaluated the situation. I was on the ground. And so was the two hundred pound block of wood that went across out swing set.

I tried to call for help, but no one heard me. My phone was nearly dead, but I had just enough battery to call my mother, who came out and helped me. At first when I stood everything was spinning and I nearly blacked out. But I started feeling better as we got into the house.

Within a day I realized that what had happened was a miracle. Both chains had snapped at the exact same time. There is absolutely no explanation for it. And I flew off forward, not backwards or straight down. If either of those factors had been changed I wouldn't be typing this right now. I'd either be dead or paralyzed from the neck down. The wood would've either smashed my head or neck if I would've landed any other way or if the chains hadn't broke.

My leg had gotten hit with the chain of the swing. Hard. It hardly bruised but it hurt really bad to walk. I wondered why God didn't just let me be okay and enjoy the night. Not that I was really hurt. But still. It seemed like a random, incomplete miracle.

It wasn't until a year later that it finally dawned on me why my leg had been hit. I had been looking at the small, faded scar one day, when I realized something. I couldn't wait to tell someone.

The next day I went to lunch with my grandmother and told her what had been on my mind.

"Do you remember how I hurt my leg last summer?" I asked.

She answered with a, "Yes."

"Well I was thinking. That scar will always be there, but it will never hurt again. People might ask about it, people might think that it's ugly, but it will never, ever, cause me pain again."

I had been struggling with so many things in my sixth grade year, that I was almost positive would affect me forever. What's even more amazing to me, is that as the psychical scar heals, the emotional ones do too. That summer I learned one truth that I will always cling to. God heals psychically, emotionally, and spiritually.