Too Burned to be Touched Written by Bambi Lynn

Today I was having a telephone conversation with a friend of mine. We started talking about how People Walk in offense so much. Everything in life is so serious that it's hard to build relationships with people like that. I gave her a word picture of a burn patient, that they are soft to the touch, and they have walked around with open wounds all their life and haven't decided yet to go get the residue scrubbed off.

In 1994, I was burned by a pressure canner, I was making sauce with the tomatoes from our garden. When my daughters were little, we had a big garden, and I would put up about five hundred quarts of things to feed our family during the winter. Plus, my ex-husbands mom made everything from scratch, and I wanted to be a good wife, with four daughters to feed at the ripe old age of twenty-four years old.

The morning started off like any other canning day, I would puree all of the tomatoes and pour them into my biggest pot, which was my sixteen-quart pressure canner. I had done this many times. Sauce has to boil down, there is too much water within the tomatoes. I put on the top to an overflowing pot. Like always I walked away, probably changing a baby's diaper. As I did lots of that in those early years. I cleaned up the table from lunch, put the babies to bed and Amber went outside to play in the sandbox with her daddy. When I finally went into the kitchen. The canner decided to seal and now it was being used as a pressure canner instead of just a giant saucepan. Didn't think anything about it until I heard it pop. Called my ex-husband into the house to unplug the seal. he had no shirt on, as it was a nice hot day. I had only a long shirt on and no bra because I knew I would be inside all day with this sauce process. My ex would get the steam out of the canner and then rub his thumb along the rim and in a split second our lives changed, as the canner exploded and the very hot sauce would fly all over the place, In the face of my ex-husband and myself. My young daughter had gotten out of bed, and I grabbed her as the sauce went all over the place. I ran to the bathroom and threw her into the bathe where My ex had thrown himself also. he was screaming as the sauce was burning his face and chest and his back. My body had gone into shock, and I went to overdrive, telling Amber to run to the neighbors where the ambulance was called, and we would be rushed to the hospital. I didn't notice my shirt was stuck to me until I was put into a room, and they had to get it off.

Many things transpire during those long two days before we were told to go to a burn unit in the city of Buffalo. So many feelings well up as I remember laying on a steal bed with my hands tied to the side of the bed and injected with morphine as they start the long grueling process of removing the died skin from my breast, I would cry as I felt the scrapping and the Brillo pad rubbing up against my skin. I describe it now as fingers on a chalkboard with no stopping. This took place two times a day and for five days straight until they finally realize I was allergic to morphine and the pain was too great for me, they decided to graph me. Take skin from my leg and put it on my breast. Gave me new skin to form around the burn parts.

This is what trauma feels like to someone who has been broken with pain that their bodies were never met to carry. When you are a child and trauma it takes over your life, it's hard to get out of your head and not to take the trauma to the next and then the next chapters of your life. We carry our trauma like a security blanket. No matter how much it hurts, we will safely be carrying it. It becomes your wall for nobody to come in or to be let in. Every encounter you have in your life is analyzed through your trauma.

The way I looked with after coming home from the burn unit seventeen days later was a process to except a different looking me.Healing had to take place in my mind and my body. I didn't even know where to start. I didn't know if I even wanted to start. Every time I saw myself in the mirror, I was angry that this happened to me.I was so mad that I had to deal with one more thing that would change my life forever.

I was used to trauma; my whole life was one trauma after another. I was tired and felt like it just followed me wherever I went, Which I realized it really did. I had nowhere to go that I didn't take my hurt and brokenness with me. The pain went with me in relationships, friendships, family, and even my relationship with God. I always felt I was never good enough and waiting for the ball to drop again. I was on edge and needed to be perfect. I was falling apart, and I didn't know how to get up and I surely had no idea how to repair myself because I didn't know who I was behind all the pain. I needed to find the courage to go deep within my soul to be set free, which was no easy task. 

I would begin the journey of letting go and finding Gods version of myself. I would dig deep and get to know the little girl within, that never had a chance to blossom. I put my feet in the sand and declared" I am not moving until I was set free. "I had no idea that thirty years later I still haven't moved from his healing grace. I didn't know the process would be lifelong. I am still on that metal table being scrub of my old ways and becoming new. I have a new identity but, the old creeps in daily. I tell myself stories that aren't true, I can in a split second think I only deserve the crumbs on the ground and not have a seat at the Kings Table. Sometimes I resort back to the baggage of not belonging and have to put that bag down and run as fast as I can away from it. I have to tell myself often, those old ways aren't working for me anymore, Thats not me and I have to move on to the new me, that I get to know and experience daily.

This takes me back to the conversation I recently had with my girlfriend, we can either be walking miracles of his grace or we can continue to suffer like a burn patient and always be sensitive to touch, to a converasation,take offense to everything, take everything personal, push away from people, or follow patterns that are destructive to you and everyone around you. Trauma happened. There is nothing you can do about it now. But you can be sick and tired or being sick and tired and run to the foot of the cross. You can allow Jesus to come in and journey with you to freedom. When you are sensitive to the touch, no one can get around you and grab your hand and walk beside you. Let's put the scares to rest and allow them only to be battle stories of I was wounded but, been set free to do something different.

Unhealed people hear with their triggers, they are hard to be friends with. Everything in life becomes a trigger of the past. sometimes, they don't even see it. I knew some of the things I did when setting people up to fit into my narrative, that no one cared. But other times I just went to my coping skills to make sure I was safe. I needed help to get past myself. They also need help getting past the trauma and the lies they have carried all their lives. The worst thing people can do is say, "oh that's just Bambi" that kept me in bondage, I needed freedom. Freedom comes when you are honest and don't allow people to be victims to their past. Look around your surroundings today, look at who you hang out with, see people through different eyes, be the brave one to stand up to the trauma and start journeying those people to freedom. You may have been put into their lives for such a time as this!! I have some of those and am forever grateful for them.