The Wounds That Became Scars

By Dylan Verdun Sullivan


It has taken me a long time to realise that not every belief we carry is one we consciously choose.
Some beliefs are never spoken aloud.
Some are never even fully formed into words.
They simply settle somewhere beneath the surface of our lives, quietly shaping the way we think, the way we grieve, the way we remember, and even the way we relate to God.
We assume we are making decisions with our conscious minds.
But often our deepest behaviours are being directed by convictions we never realised we held.
I think I uncovered one of those hidden convictions during my shift the other night at Gold Coast University Hospital.
I have spent the last week praying reflecting and thinking through this before I sat down to write this.
It wasn't during a dramatic moment.
There wasn't some extraordinary circumstance unfolding around me.
It was simply one of those quiet spaces that sometimes appear in the middle of an ordinary shift, where the noise settles just enough for your own thoughts to become impossible to ignore.
As I walked the corridors and moved through the rhythm of the night, I found myself praying.
Not asking for anything in particular.
Just talking with God.
Then, almost without warning, the Lord began quietly speaking to me about something that had been living beneath the surface of my life for years.
It wasn't an audible voice.
It was one of those powerful moments where truth arrives with such clarity that you know it did not originate from your own thinking.
As I listened, I realised something that genuinely caught me by surprise.
Somewhere deep within me, I had been keeping certain wounds alive.
Not consciously.
If someone had asked me whether I wanted to move on from my past, I would have answered yes without hesitation.
If someone had asked whether I wanted healing, I would have said absolutely.
If someone had asked whether I still wanted to carry the weight of old seasons, I would have answered no.
I have never wanted to remain trapped by the hardest chapters of my life.
And yet..
Somewhere beneath everything I consciously believed, another belief had quietly taken root.
A belief I had never intentionally chosen.
I had somehow convinced myself that if I stopped revisiting certain memories...
I might somehow lose them.
Lose the people.
Lose the lessons.
Loose those soul stirring moments in my past that still to this day take my breath away.
Loose the Love that constantly reminded me of better days.
Lose the seasons that shaped me.
Lose the younger version of myself who fought so hard just to survive.
I never sat down and decided to believe that.
It wasn't a philosophy.
It wasn't something I could have explained if someone had asked me.
It was operating silently beneath the surface.
Subconsciously.
It was hard woven into my nervous system,
Almost as though my mind had made a quiet agreement with itself years ago.
"Keep the wound open... because if it heals, perhaps you'll forget why it mattered."
Looking back now, I can see traces of that belief everywhere.
Why certain conversations returned to me so often.
Why particular memories still carried the same emotional weight decades later.
Why I found myself revisiting certain seasons over and over again, even though I genuinely believed I had moved beyond them.
I wasn't trying to torture myself.
I wasn't trying to stay broken.
I wasn't refusing healing.
I simply believed, without ever admitting it, that remembering required reliving.
That the only way to honour what happened was to continue feeling what happened.
As though pain itself had become the evidence that those chapters still mattered.
As though the ache was proof that the people mattered.
Proof that the battle mattered.
Proof that I had not forgotten.
I think many of us do this without ever realising it.
We replay conversations long after everyone else has forgotten them.
We revisit old heartbreaks.
Old grief.
Old failures.
Old versions of ourselves.
Not because we secretly enjoy suffering.
But because somewhere inside us, we become afraid that healing might erase what shaped us.
We begin confusing peace with forgetting.
We begin believing that moving forward somehow dishonours where we have been.
I never realised I was carrying that belief.
Until the Lord gently placed His finger on it.
And everything began to change.
Tears rolled down my face as the Lord continued to reveal what I had been carrying for years.
Then He spoke something that I don't think I will ever forget.
"You don't have to be in the middle of the furnace yourself to walk people through to the other side."
I just stood there.
Completely undone.
Because in that single sentence, He exposed something I had never seen before.
Somewhere along the way, I had quietly begun believing that if the pain ever fully left, my usefulness would leave with it.
As though I needed to keep the wound open in order to help wounded people.
As though healing somehow disqualified me from understanding suffering.
But scars tell the story just as truthfully as wounds.
Perhaps even more truthfully.
A wound is still bleeding.
A scar remembers without bleeding.
A wound says, "This is still happening to me."
A scar says, "This happened to me, but it did not destroy me."
There is something profoundly beautiful about that.
Jesus still carried scars after the resurrection.
Not wounds.
Scars.
The suffering had ended.
The love had not.
His scars became evidence, not of ongoing pain, but of completed redemption.
Perhaps ours can become the same.
Perhaps God never intended for us to live with permanently open wounds.
Perhaps He intended to heal them so completely that one day they would become testimonies instead of injuries.
Not because we forget what happened.
But because we no longer have to bleed in order to remember.
That changes everything.
It means healing is not betrayal.
Peace is not forgetting.
Joy is not disrespecting the past.
Moving forward is not abandoning the people we once were.
It is allowing God to complete the work He has been doing all along.
The younger version of me does not need me to stay wounded.
He needs me to keep walking.
He needs me to keep moving forward.
The people I have lost are not honoured by my remaining trapped in grief.
They are honoured by the life I continue to live.
The battles I fought are not remembered because I keep reopening them.
They are remembered because, by the grace of God, I survived them.
Perhaps that is what scars really are.
Not evidence that we avoided suffering.
Evidence that suffering did not have the final word.
As I finished my shift and quietly walked back through those hospital corridors, I realised something had changed.
Not around me.
Within me.
The memories were still there.
The people were still there.
The lessons were still there.
Nothing had been lost.
The only thing beginning to disappear was the fear that healing meant forgetting.
It doesn't.
It never did.
Sometimes God doesn't ask us to revisit the furnace.
Sometimes He simply asks us to stand on the other side of it.
...and help the next person find their way through.

About the Author

Dylan Verdun Sullivan is the founder of Refined by Fire Press and an Australian author indexed in the National Library of Australia. As a Level 7 Local Guide with over 7.1 million views on Google Maps, he documents the intersection of faith, recovery, and the light found in ordinary places.

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