  When I was a little girl the one thing that I would do often was skin my knees. I would fall while riding my bike or climb a tree and scrape my knee against the trunk.
My dad would be disappointed and tell me that I should be more careful because scars don’t look good. One day, I climbed up onto a large boulder and slipped off. I scrapped up my elbows and knees pretty bad. I didn’t want my parents to know so I ran home and cleaned it up on my own. It hurt really badly and there was no one there to comfort me while I was trying to clean up the wound. I spent the next few days hiding my wound. I wore long sleeve shirts and pants. Both would scratch up the wound even more, but I was determined not to show that I had fallen again.
I didn’t want to disappoint anyone. Eventually, my mom noticed the blood on my clothes and asked me about it. When I looked down at the scrapes they looked as if I had just fallen. She took me into the bathroom and started to clean out what I had missed. It seemed to hurt worse than before, but she held my hand and hugged me on occasion. She put some ointment on it and bandages it up. A few days later I barely noticed the scrapes. It’s interesting how sometimes we fall and try to clean up our own wounds.
We hide them because we feel as if we’ve failed somehow. We feel almost shameful of them, but they continue to surface until we finally realize that we aren’t meant to heal ourselves. Psalm 139 says, “O Lord, you have searched me and you know me. You know when I sit and when I rise; you perceive my thoughts from afar. You discern my going out and my lying down; you are familiar with all my ways…” And He knows our hurts…He sees our wounds even when we hide them and He loves us through each hurt.
Brennan Manning wrote, “Jesus knows what hurts us. Not only knows but, knowing, seeks us out – whatever our kind of poverty or pain, however we weep, wherever we feel unloved.” As I walk through these days with surfacing wounds, I pray that you all know, through God healing can happen. As much as each surfacing wound brings about hurt…with it comes healing. 
