Your Scars Are Not Your Shame | Mornings with Mico

Good people, what's going on? My name is Miko and this is my one-on-one time with God today. I just wanna start by saying I've been very blessed by just some of the letters that I've read recently that you guys have sent in, just kind of sharing testimonies and just what it is God's doing in you. And you guys just speaking about how this has blessed you or how God's used this to strengthen you or point to you or to encourage you. That's just very encouraging to hear as I'm sitting across this camera, just kind of sharing with you some things that God is just speaking to me and just to actually get to hear and see some of the fruit that it's producing in your guys' life. It's a blessing, right? So this week, I'm actually going to, I wanna take some of these letters that I've received and they are the inspiration for our devotion this week. So just kind of wanna, I won't be too forthcoming with people's information. I'm not gonna mention anybody's names. I'm actually not allowed to. I did that once and they told me not to. So yeah, we don't do that, all right. But starting today, I wanna speak from this thought. Your scars are not your shame. They're your testimony.

A letter came in from Florida not too long ago and from someone who lost their entire family at a very young age. As I read their story, I couldn't help but think myself like just about all that they had endured as I was just processing just what they were sharing in this letter. And it's the kind of pain that could easily leave someone bitter or hardened. I've seen that in a number of people's lives, being a life coach and sitting across from people and just hearing their stories and the things that they've been through and seeing how it's hardened their heart in the process. Sharing the kind of losses that could really make a person question like whether God is good at all, or does he exist? Or if he's so good, then why would he allow this? Some of those questions that could really begin to stir up hardness in your hearts. And then I came across this line in this person's letter and it just kind of stopped me in my tracks. They simply said, God uses our brokenness. And immediately I'm like, you could see a shimmer of light shining through all of this darkness that they were sharing in this letter. Because that's not coming from someone who had studied suffering in a book. That's from someone who's like walked through some rough, dark seasons in life.

Someone who's lived it, right? And this is someone who had every reason on paper to be angry, every reason to give up, right? Yet somehow they had discovered something that many of us spend our whole lives trying to learn. God doesn't waste pain. There's a passage in 2 Corinthians, starting in chapter four, verse seven. It says, but we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all surpassing power is from God and not from us. We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed, perplexed, but not in despair, persecuted, but not abandoned, struck down, but not destroyed. We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body. For we who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus' sake, so that this life may also be revealed in our mortal body. So being death is at work in us, but life is at work in you. And this is just like this passage, I don't know, as I'm reading this letter, like this passage is, it's like these are those opportunities for you to see what this passage is describing, like in real life. As I sat with the letter, I thought about how much energy we spend

hiding our broken places, right? The addiction, the convictions, the abandonment, the mistakes, the wounds that we never asked for, or the wounds that we caused ourselves, right? We assume God can use the polished version of us, but not the broken version of us. Yes, scripture tells a different story. Paul says that we carry God's treasure in jars of clay. Fragile jars, right? Broken, cracked jars. Why? Why so? I believe it's because when God's light shines through our lives, he wants people to know the power came from him. He wants to place whatever it is, our brokenness, on display for his light to be able to have an opportunity to shine through and people recognize undoubtedly where that light came from. What if the very thing that you've been trying to hide is the thing God wants to redeem? He doesn't want you to be condemned by it. He wants to redeem it. He wants to use this, right? To place this on display so that he could redeem it so that people who also may have had some of those similar burdens or carry some of those similar struggles so that they can now have a road map to what God's love looks like in this season as well as what his love does in overcoming it. I think a lot of times so many of us we're so fixated on like reserving ourselves, preserving ourselves, that we're unwilling to show our cracks and our fragileness and our brokenness, but ultimately that goes against God's plan because God doesn't need you to appear perfect and polished and put together in order for him to use you.

He wants to use the broken, fragile, cracked part of you, version of you, so that his light can be on display. We're ultimately here to glorify him and he's glorified in our weaknesses, in our brokenness, in our fragility, right? I believe, for me anyway, I've seen it over and over. Men and women who have experienced incredible pain become carriers of incredible hope. People who have been restored become agents of this restoration. We become a reference point of what this restoration looks like. That's exactly what I saw in this letter. Not someone whose pain disappeared, someone whose pain has been repurposed, right? Someone's pain who's been placed in God's hands so that God can use it for what he wants to use it for. And maybe that's what God wants to do in your life, too. I got a question. What part of your story have you been trying to hide that God might ultimately want to redeem? What season of your life, what struggles, what are some things that may have been meant by the enemy to break you and tear you down? But ultimately God wants that on display, that he may use that to bring glory to him and that that may also be a reference point for others who are also struggling with that or still trying to make sense of seasons in their lives that they struggle with. What if he wants to use your story specifically to shine his light through so that someone else can see what forgiveness looks like, what redemption in this area looks like, what God using you in the midst of your struggle looks like. Someone else may need to see that in order to experience the breakthrough that God has for them. What if that's how God wants to use you? I'm gonna pray for us and we're gonna close. But I stop hiding my broken places.

Take what wounded me and use it for your glory. Redeem what I've been ashamed of and let my story become a source of hope for someone else. Amen.