Stage Five is not the end of your story. It is the moment your story becomes useful.
There is a version of your story you tell in public. It is clean. It is vague. It has a before and an after, and the middle has been surgically removed. “I went through a hard season.” “God brought me through some things.” You have polished it so smooth that nothing can catch on it — and that is exactly the problem. Nothing can catch on it. No drowning man can grab hold of a story that has been sanded down to a testimony-shaped ornament.
Somewhere near you is a man who is still in the middle you cut out. He is hiding what you hid. He is managing what you managed. And when he scans the room for someone safe to tell, he is not looking for the most impressive man there. He is looking for a scar.
The Risen Christ Kept His Scars
Here is a detail of the resurrection that should stop you cold. When Jesus rose from the dead — glorified, victorious, death behind Him — He kept the wounds. He did not have to. The body that walked out of that tomb could pass through locked doors. It could have been flawless. Instead, the first thing He did in that locked room was show them His hands and His side.
So when it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and when the doors were shut where the disciples were, for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood in their midst and said to them, “Peace be with you.” And when He had said this, He showed them both His hands and His side. The disciples then rejoiced when they saw the Lord. — John 20:19–20 (NASB1995)
A week later, for Thomas, He went further. He did not rebuke the doubter and demand blind belief. He offered him the scars. “Reach here with your finger, and see My hands; and reach here your hand and put it into My side” (John 20:27, NASB1995). And it was the scars — not the sermon, not the argument — that pulled the confession out of Thomas that no one else in the Gospels ever says so plainly: “My Lord and my God!”
The wounds were the evidence. The wounds were the welcome. If the sinless Son of God carries His scars into eternity as proof that the worst thing really happened and God really overcame it, what exactly are you protecting by hiding yours?
The Only Man a Hiding Man Will Trust
Watch what happens in a room of struggling men when a put-together man speaks. Arms fold. Eyes drop. Every hiding man in the room makes the same silent calculation: he would not understand. Now watch the room when a man says, “I lost it all. I lied to my wife for years. I know what the floor feels like.” Heads come up. Because a man who has been exposed and lived — exposed, all the way, and lived — is the only kind of man another hiding man will trust.
This is not a technique. It is how God has always worked. When Jesus delivered the demoniac in the country of the Gerasenes, the man begged to come along. Jesus said no — and gave him an assignment instead.
And He did not let him, but He said to him, “Go home to your people and report to them what great things the Lord has done for you, and how He had mercy on you.” — Mark 5:19 (NASB1995)
Go home. To the people who knew you at your worst. To the ones who chained you in the tombs. Your history there is not the disqualification — it is the credential. Nobody in Decapolis could argue with the man who used to scream among the graves now sitting clothed and in his right mind. They could dismiss a doctrine. They could not dismiss him.
Paul Put His Worst in the Display Case
The apostle Paul never got over what he had been, and he never hid it either. Late in his life, writing to Timothy, he still called himself the foremost of sinners — present tense. And then he explained why God saved a man like that:
Yet for this reason I found mercy, so that in me as the foremost, Jesus Christ might demonstrate His perfect patience as an example for those who would believe in Him for eternal life. — 1 Timothy 1:16 (NASB1995)
Read that again. God saved Paul so that Paul’s story could sit in the display case — a permanent public exhibit of how much patience Christ has. Your rescue was never only about you. “They overcame him because of the blood of the Lamb and because of the word of their testimony” (Revelation 12:11, NASB1995). The blood does the saving. The testimony does the reaching. And a testimony with the middle cut out reaches no one.
A Credential, Not a Script
One warning before you go find that man. Your scar is a credential. It is not a script. The scar buys you a seat on the floor next to him — it does not make your outcome his promise. Maybe your wife stayed. His may not. Maybe your church restored you. His may not. Do not hand him your ending as if it were guaranteed with the package. Grace wrote your story; grace holds the pen on his. What you can promise him is not your outcome. It is your presence, and your God. “Power is perfected in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9, NASB1995) — the power is God’s, and it moves through the crack in you, not the polish on you.
Stage Five Returns to Stage One
This is the last mile of the Transformation Path, and it runs in a circle on purpose. Stage One was exposure — seeing it clearly, saying it out loud. Stage Five is standing beside another man while he faces his Stage One. And the tool God will use in that room is the very thing you have been keeping covered. The affair you never mention. The arrest. The addiction. The year your family almost ended. Covered, it is a liability you manage for the rest of your life. Uncovered — healed, but visible — it is proof, sitting in plain sight, that a man can be fully known and still stand.
So here is the decision point. There is a man God has been putting in front of you — you already know his name. He does not need your advice. He does not need your theology, not yet. He needs to see the scar and hear the sentence you have been editing out. Not for shame’s sake. For his sake.
The gospel is not that Jesus makes your past disappear. It is that He takes the worst of it into His own body on the tree, buries it in His grave, and walks out with wounds that now mean peace be with you. Your scars can mean that too — to somebody. Stop covering the proof.
Teaching the Word. Watching the Times. — SmithForChrist