May your days be full of wonder
May your nights be full of stars
May you dance at every party
And may you learn to love the scars
I’ve seen life through colored windows
I’ve seen life through prison bars
I have slid down wooden rainbows
And I’ve learned to love the scars
Sometimes that midnight train
Don’t roll in till after dawn
And when that whistle blows
You hum along that sweet sad song
That’s when the blues seeps down into your bones
And you know you’re not afraid
And that any road will lead you home
Cause every day’s a new beginning
When you open up your heart
You will laugh like a baby
And you will learn to love the scars
My good friend John Kilzer wrote the song “Scars,” whose words are just above, right before he died.
John’s point was that for all of us life is a mixture of the joyful, the triumphant and the scars we can’t avoid. As we get older, we will only be able to embrace our last days if we learn to love the scars.
Aging is a strange unavoidable journey. It creeps up on us in the mirror, in the creeks of our joints, in the way the years pile up behind us like footprints in the sand — some deep, some washed away.
We all carry fear with us: fear of what time will take, fear of regrets, fear of becoming unrecognizable to ourselves. And yet if we look closely, there is a quiet beauty in what remains.
The scars — physical, emotional and invisible — tell our stories. Each wrinkle, each loss, each hard-won lesson marks where we have been and what we have survived.
We spend so much of our lives trying to cover them up, to rewind the clock, to pretend the passage of time hasn’t touched us.
But what if instead we learned to love the evidence of our own resilience? What if we saw aging not as a slow erosion but as an unveiling, one that brings us closer to who we really are?
With age comes a clarity youth could never grasp. The endless striving, the hunger for approval, the need to chase what we think we should want — it all fades into something simpler, something truer.
We begin to know what really matters: love, kindness, God, the ability to sit in stillness without the itch to be somewhere else.
The moments we once raced past become the moments we now savor: the warmth of a friend’s voice, the sun spilling across the kitchen table, the quiet knowing that we are enough just as we are.
There is also, if we allow it, a deepening connection to the unseen. When we are young, we live so much on the surface — focused on what can be built, achieved and displayed.
But as we grow older, we feel the pull toward something greater than ourselves. Whether we call it the presence of God, spirituality, wisdom or simply awareness, welcome to understand we are a part of something vast and eternal.
The universe is far beyond my imagination.
The people we have lost are still with us in ways the wind moves through the trees, in the echoes of laughter, in the love that never leaves.
Aging does not ask for our permission, and it doesn’t allow us to undo what has been done. We can’t go back and relive the moments we rushed through, nor can we erase the pain we have endured.
But we can let go of regret and embrace the here and the now. We can stop fearing the unknown and trust every scar, every wrinkle and every year has brought us closer to something deeper.
We are all scarred, yes. But we are also wise. And in time, if we let it, aging will show us the beauty of life was never in perfection. It was always the imperfection, the scars, the stories and the love we have given and received along the way.
Read the full story on Daily Memphian.
The Rev. Dr. G. Scott Morris, M.D., is founder of Church Health. He is a regular contributor to The Daily Memphian.
The Daily Memphian is the must-read, primary daily online publication for intelligent, in-depth journalism in the Memphis community. The Daily Memphian reports on critical news, holds political, business and community leaders accountable, and engages with and entertains its readers – all while seeking truth, acting with integrity, and never fearing stories simply because of their negative or positive attributes. Led by a seasoned team of veteran journalists, The Daily Memphian is of Memphis, not just in Memphis, and seeks to tell the stories of this city.
