This hit me while journaling one morning: there’s a difference between scars and scar tissue. And spiritually, I think that difference matters.
A scar tells us there was once a wound. Something happened, something hurt, and even after healing, evidence of it remains. But I started thinking about scar tissue as a picture of the ways we learn to protect the places that have been wounded.
Spiritually, maybe scars say, “God healed me,” while scar tissue says, “I can’t survive that pain again.”
Scars remember pain. Scar tissue remembers fear.
And that fear isn’t weakness. When you’ve been hurt deeply, you learn how to protect yourself. You learn what to watch for, how to read a room, not to trust too quickly, and which parts of yourself are safer kept hidden. Those things may have helped you survive. But what once protected you can eventually restrict you.
Some of us stopped bleeding, but never stopped bracing.
The wound isn’t open anymore, but trust is still hard. Vulnerability is hard. Intimacy, surrender, rest, being fully seen…all still hard. We can know God has healed something and still protect it like it’s an open wound.
I love that after the resurrection, Jesus still had scars. In John 20:27, He tells Thomas to look at His hands. His wounds were healed, but the story remained.
Maybe that’s part of healing too. We don’t have to erase what happened to prove God healed us. We don’t have to pretend it didn’t hurt or forget the chapters that changed us. The scars can stay.
But God also gives us this picture in Ezekiel 36:26 of replacing a heart of stone with a heart of flesh. Because maybe healing isn’t only about closing wounds. It’s about restoring softness too.
It’s learning to trust again. To be known again. To rest without constantly watching for what might happen next. To love without demanding a guarantee that we’ll never be hurt.
Maybe healing isn’t pretending you were never wounded.
Maybe it’s learning you no longer have to live guarded all the time.