Switchfoot just released their 10th album. As usual, its excellent stuff. On the title track, they express much of how I have been feeling for at least the last 4 years, if not the last 10. Take a look:
When you are feeling like an astronaut, stuck on a planet even time forgot. And you’re a version of yourself but you’re not the same. You try to keep the wound camouflaged and the stitches heal but the years are lost and another bottle on the shelf can’t numb the pain.
It was somewhere in 2010 or so that I started telling my friends that I had found a metaphor to explain how I was feeling in my own country. I would tell them that it was as if I had woken up to discover that I had been whisked away to another planet. 
The new planet looked the same; I could breathe oxygen and drink the water, but somehow everything was different. None of the rules of life, the mores and values from my childhood, were the same.
Learning to navigate in the midst of that lostness, that confusion, has been my great challenge over these last years. It hasn’t been any easier as I deal with the pain and confusion of growing older, only to discover life hasn’t exactly turned out the way I thought it might. The wounds from disappointments, as well as from those given by other people, start to grow in number and break me down.
Switchfoot’s idea that we try to camouflage our wounds is apt. We don’t like to be transparent to others, even to the ones we think we know best. There’s always something that pushes us to keep our guard up and the mask on. I read recently an old proverb or story that you could live with someone for 50 years, but if you took that person hostage, tied them up and lowered them over a cliff…in that moment would you finally “meet the man.” It is in that sense of isolation, usually self-inflicted, that we try to navigate through the challenging times of life.
In the end, we need each other. We need to recognize that each of us bears scars. We only truly are when we realize we live in community together. The African proverb is “I am because we are.” Switchfoot touches on this when they sing “Ain’t we all just Abraham’s sons…and falling on our knees, we all bleed the same.”
How do I find solace? For me, as well as for Switchfoot in this song, the answer is found in Jesus Christ. He is the Light, and singing this truth, the band croons “your wounds are where the light shines through; the wound is where the Light finds you.”
So, as I learn to navigate like a forgotten astronaut, a version of myself but certainly not the same, I need to remember that my scars, my wounds, are where the Light finds me. C.S. Lewis wrote that “pain is God’s megaphone”…in other words, to get your attention. Hang in there, my fellow space travelers…you may be needing to learn how this new planet works, but you can do it. Just remember that the God who bears scars on his hands and feet sees you.
You are never alone.