Our Scars Will Protect Us?
~ Thoughts After Watching Snow White and The Huntsman ~
I recently re-watched Snow White and The Huntsman (Universal Pictures) and there is a single line of dialogue that stuck with me over the following days as I realized what a lie it would be to believe it as truth.
Slight Spoilers Ahead
There was a village of women and children that Snow White and the Huntsman seek shelter in.
Snow White and the leader of the women are having a conversation as Snow White notices that all of the women and little girls have thick scars on their cheeks.
Realizing the confusion Snow White is experiencing, the village woman responds with five words.
“Our scars will protect us.”
Beautiful. Powerful.
Then came my mental pause as it soaked in.
Yes, at first it does sound powerful, and it certainly was in the theatrical context, a sad sacrifice allowing for survival in that bleak make-believe land where an evil queen punishes anyone defined as beautiful by herself or the enigmatic magic mirror. It shields them from her cruelty. A choice both hard to make and yet necessary, making them beautiful talismans of an under-current of resistance to the evil ruler.
The pause though, was in the context of our lives.
Should this be true for us?
Certainly I’ve met many people who seem to echo this sentiment, here in our realm devoid of evil queens, magicked apples, and the like.
I say no.
It is truth that we can never truly be rid of the hurts of our past, but to use the shield metaphor once more, a shield has to be held, it doesn’t stay up by itself. While holding onto it, you cannot let go to reach for something else. In life, holding on to the hurt means holding on to the past in which it occurred. You can’t let go to reach for the future, to move on.
I thought this simply echoed the theme from their time among the trees of the Dark Forest, which they spent a good portion of the film tramping through. The branches grasping at them, the miasmic mist holding them in scenes of the past, keeping them dwelling there, preventing them from progressing forward easily, or sometimes even at all.
To hold our scars close, our wounds — is the same as staying in the Dark Forest. It is to hold onto anger, to live in that moment, in the past. We cannot look backward and move forward, at least not safely. We are likely to stumble and fall.
So while it was a beautiful moment in the movie, and I really enjoyed the re-watch of Snow White and The Huntsman, it is not a practice I believe we should take into our lives.
Indeed the Bible clearly instructs us not to.
Isaiah 43:18 (NIV)— Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past.
Philippians 3:13b (NIV)— But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead (referring to pressing into the calling of Jesus on his life — Paul)
2 Corinthians 5:17 (NIV)— Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!
The list could certainly go on, but suffice to say, we who believe on Jesus as our savior, more than anyone should certainly keep our eyes fixed forward on Jesus and His plans, discarding all that came before.
But for everyone, believer and non-believer alike, I would encourage you not to cling to the scars of the past in an effort to protect oneself. Let us leave them to fade into the past, with the memories of the anger and hurts that caused them, and face confidently forward, toward the new day, with hearts open to all that lay before us.
