The Father of Scars

Ten years ago next month, I started a new life.

When I was fourteen, my mother lay in a tuberculosis sanitarium fighting for her life, while at home her mother died of kidney disease. Thirty-six months later, when I was seventeen, Mom lost her life to kidney disease as well. At twenty-eight, I learned the genetic lottery had not dealt me a winning ticket. With a 50–50 chance to dodge the hereditary bullet, I had not been fast enough. I, too, had polycystic kidney disease.

When you’re young (and oh, twenty-eight was still so young), you assume a cure will come, medical science will triumph, and surely you won’t go through the suffering you watched others endure.

But then science fails you, and you find yourself ten or fifteen years later unable to keep up with your kids in the yard and falling asleep before the dinner plates are cleared. I started to realize, despite my proficient reluctance and denial, that it was time to seriously think about the possibility that I would, in fact, go through the same medical nightmare my mother had.

The list of living donors for me was short. Despite my having won the jackpot of six siblings, none of them had a health history that allowed them to give me a kidney. The wait for non-living donors is interminable, and dialysis was the one thing everyone wanted to avoid. So my doctor looked around. Finding my husband to be a medical option, it didn’t take him long to ask him, “Will you?”

The man who once pledged himself to me “for better or worse, in sickness or in health” answered, “Is that really a question?”

So ten years ago, in the final days of May, a couple of weeks after our twenty-first wedding anniversary, the surgeons took a kidney out of my husband’s body and put it into mine. “Flesh of my flesh” is no longer a metaphor in our household. I really do take a little of him with me wherever I go.

June was the beginning of my second shot, a chance to write a story with a different ending than my mother’s. What I didn’t know while struggling to sleep on my back on that old air mattress in the extra downstairs room that month while the scars healed, was that God was writing a story I had not expected.

A story of living boldly.

I didn’t anticipate this story. But something happened after the surgery, a “good and perfect gift…from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows” (James 1:17 NIV). My scars made me unafraid. I had spent so many years living in the shadow of my mom’s illness and death, fearful despite the head knowledge that I had far better odds, that when the shadows lifted, I could see life more clearly. I could see that many of the things I had feared so much had little power.

Other peoples’ opinions. Mistakes. Writing the truth.

Whitewater rafting a wild Tennessee river. Crisscrossing a continent with little more than an Eurail pass and a 2-foot-square suitcase. Leading a mission trip to Costa Rica and zip lining the canopy while there, because why not?

Loving the prodigal, the stranger, the unseen.

These are things I never would have dared without the scars to remind me: I have survived worse. I can do harder things than this.

My scars from the operations run across my body like tracks at a railroad terminal. They cross my entire abdomen, in both directions. Large scars, by any measure. Still puffy in places, even after ten years. Of course, I thought them ugly at first.

I don’t anymore.

My scars have taught me that fear does not have to win. Love can cast it out. They have forced me where I would not have gone and shown me the beauty of God’s places and God’s people that I would not have dared explore.

Because of that, they have taken on all the beauty of those things. They are one of those good and perfect gifts. Ten years later, I can only look back in awe of the beauty God has infused them with.

We all have our scars, those places where we have survived what we didn’t think we would or could. Maybe we haven’t all looked on them as beautiful. But God does. God “does not change like shifting shadows”—the shadows of fear we live in. He is the Father of lights. And beautiful scars.

Jill Richardson is a writer, speaker, pastor, mom of three, and author of five books. She likes to travel, grow flowers, read Tolkien, and research her next project. She believes in Jesus, grace, restoration, kindness, justice, and dark chocolate. Her passion is partnering with the next generation of faith. Jill blogs at jillmrichardson.com.