Daily 5 - Year 3, Day 280

Today's Daily 5:

1. A cute little red rental car for this week's clinical, that was nice and easy for driving
2. being paired with a really awesome nurse for the day of visits
3. a whole collection of new experiences
4. twins!
5. the joy of having a paper shredder all my own (okay, so this one is geeky, but it really is nice to have picked one of these up tonight, and not have to think about hauling my shredding to my parents place on weekends any more!)

It Doesn't Have to Leave a Scar

Source: theokayproject.tumblr.com via ally on Pinterest

I wasn't planning to ever write this post. To ever share this story on my blog. But I was paging through pinterest as I sat in class last week, listening to a long slightly dry lecture, and I came across the above image, and in an instant I was back in that moment, those moments.

I was standing in the train station, leaving frantic messages for my pastor and his wife, in need of advice and prayer. Leaving messages telling them that I was on the way to respond to a distress call of sorts from a friend who'd called and asked if I could meet up - it had been a bad day and my friend was considering self harm.

I was sitting on the bus, praying desperate prayers, still hoping my phone would ring with one of those messages returned, feeling very alone as I waited for my friend to arrive.

And I was sitting in the Starbucks, back in a corner, near a window, watching as the friend rolled up a pant leg, revealing a word carved into the flesh of their calf.

It read BROKEN, in jagged letters, scratched out in the most visible expression of truth speaking that I have ever experienced.

I wasn't planning to tell that story in this space, but it is one that has never left me.  It is an image, a moment, a series of moments that has burned itself permanently into my memory.

Letting it out doesn't have to leave a scar.  The image on pinterest transported me to the moment of seeing the fresh wound, a message, a cry, a desperation carved into flesh.  It transported me to the weeks of follow-up, of seeing the word slowly fade into the skin and begin to disappear.

That moment shaped me.  It cemented into my heart a calling to sit with the broken, and particularly with broken women.  It (along with some other moments from that vintage, also equally ingrained within my memory) began this journey of healing, of mental health, of being present and finding Jesus amidst the broken spaces.  It's the journey that I'm seeing expressed right now in nursing school - the journey I remind myself of on the days when I want to be anywhere BUT sitting in nursing school, or anywhere BUT sitting in a therapy appointment, making strides in my own journey of brokenness and healing.

I hadn't planned to share that story in this space, but it's a story that has shaped me, is shaping me, and will continue to shape me.  I will never forget that word, that cry, that truth carved into flesh.  But the words that go with the image from pinterest that transported me back to that moment? Those are the words that are the other half of the story, the part that has shaped my journey since then.  Letting it out, healing, finding expression of this doesn't have to leave a scar.  And that is the thing I pray for as I move forward in this journey - that for myself, and for others, we can heal so deeply that even some of the scars disappear.