How Can My Scars Be Unexpected Gifts?

Steve Jobs, the complicated visionary and now-deceased former CEO of Apple, was famous for saying that the customer isn’t always right. He wasn’t trying to be insulting. But he recognized that if you were doing something new or something that didn’t check all the predictable boxes, there was a good chance the customer wouldn’t know what they wanted or would want things that weren’t good for them in the long run. Jobs said: 

Our job is to figure out what they’re going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, “If I’d ask customers what they wanted, they would’ve told me a faster horse.” People don’t know what they want until you show it to them. That’s why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.[1]

To be fair, fifteen years ago, I could have never imagined that in 2025 I would have a device in my pocket stronger than the average 2010 PC. Many things that change in our lives are like this. We don’t really know that we need them, or that they are good for us, or that they will help us until we are on the other side of it. Similarly, it’s hard for some of us to imagine that the cross we are enduring could somehow work for our good.

If you have gone through hard times, most of us look to Christ’s resurrection as a beacon of hope for our lives and leadership. Yet, Jesus is not the God most of us are looking for. Instead of a glamorous resurrection that eliminates any memory of death on a cross, Jesus’ resurrected body bears the marks of the suffering endured for the salvation of us all.

Nicholas Wolterstorff writes in Lament for a Son, “God is not only the God of the sufferers but the God who suffers.”[2] It would be harder to trust that God is good if God hadn’t also suffered. How could God really love us or know us if God also wasn’t with us in our heartache, suffering, loss, and death?

We often give Jesus’ disciple Thomas a hard time for doubting the reality of the resurrection. But his questions are our gain as we learn that Jesus’ body still carries the holes where the nails were and a piercing in his side where the spear entered.[3] When we go through change and suffering in our lives, the promise isn’t the absence of scars but that scars will become the new markers of death’s defeat.

Scars can be gifts. Unfortunately, we resist change in our lives so easily because we forget or bury the pain of the struggle. Change is often filled with loss, but Jesus’ scars remind us  of death’s defeat and the cross-shaped resurrection power that still left marks on his body.

How might you keep your scars visible the next time you face change? Visible scars can help us reflect on the resurrection power of previous experiences and remember God’s faithfulness to see us through our current struggle into new life on the other side.

[1] “This is Steve Jobs’s Most Controversial Legacy. It is Also His Most Brilliant”, https://www.inc.com/jason-aten/this-was-steve-jobs-most-controversial-legacy-it-was-also-his-most-brilliant.html (last accessed Monday, April 28, 2025).

[2] Nicholas Wolterstorff, Lament for a Son, (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1987), 81.

[3] John 20:24-29.