The Scars of Sin

When we were nine or ten, my cousin and I had a very special place we loved to play. Her parents had a hardware store just off the town square. Beneath the hardware store was a basement with an outside entrance and very steep steps that went down from the inside at the back of the store. There was always a lot of hardware junk down there but enough room for us to play. We spent hours after school playing there. One of our favorite things was also making up plays to perform although we were never allowed to have anyone else come and watch them. We really loved singing and dancing to a particular song called “Abba Dabba Honeymoon”. It was about two monkeys who went on a honeymoon and we would sing it at the top of our lungs while dancing around like a couple of monkeys.

Cousin and I also played a lot in my backyard. Her mother worked in their hardware stone so she would come and spend the afternoons at my house. I remember that we didn’t get along some of the time and would eventually get into a big argument and maybe a pushing and shoving match. One particular afternoon, just after my parents had some linoleum tile put down in our kitchen, my cousin and I got into a very heated argument. She picked up a piece of leftover tile that was laying there in the yard. With one wild swing the caught my head with that piece of tile just above my eye and cut a big, bleeding gash. I have the scar to this day. Needless to say, our playing for that afternoon was over very quickly.

Years later, after my Cousin and I both had married, we went to Texas to visit them. By then, we both had daughters who were very near the same age. Those two little girls were very much like my cousin and me. On this particular visit, the two little girls decided it would be great fun to jump up and down on the bed. So, jump and squeal they did! During that rowdy play, her daughter pushed my daughter into the head of the bed and, yep, you guessed it, that incident left a big gash just above the eye of my daughter; a scar she wears to this day.

We are all born with sin in our lives. Our hearts are not turned toward Jesus when we come from our Mother’s womb. Until we have “open heart surgery” through the blood of Jesus Christ, our hearts will remain deceitful.

“The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?” Jeremiah 17:9 NIV

The scars of sin are much like the gashes on our heads. The consequences are felt and sometimes visible for the rest of our lives. But, even though we may wear the scars of our sins, our Savior can come into our hearts and cleanse our heart of all the sins of our past, present and our future.

“Create in me a pure heart, oh God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me.” Psalms 51:10 NIV