Being the light of the world is about being a broken, exploding, scarred star and shining a light of hope and inspiration to everyone around you.

I hope one day love will find you and kiss all the places in your soul that's been scarred

Had the Battle of Franklin ever really ended? Carrie walked her cemetery, and around her the wounds closed up and scarred over, but only in that way that an oak struck by lightning heals itself by twisting and bending around the wound: it is still recognizably a tree, it still lives as a tree, it still puts out its leaves and acorns, but its center, hidden deep within the curtain of green, remains empty and splintered where it hasn't been grotesquely scarred over. We are happy the tree hasn't died, and from the proper angle we can look on it and suppose that it is the same tree as it ever was, but it is not and never will be.

Beauty... Is what you are after a lifetime of struggle in the face of hostility, surviving, and standing scarred and unafraid, triumphant before your enemies.

The mindset of loss of a loved one is to understand that the loss will never be undone. You must live with it, like it or not. But, to live well, you must turn that loss into something positive. That way, you can become the best version of yourself; scarred, flawed and unstoppable

Tender Ember...Barred and brandedto be forever unlovedI was a tender emberseeking solace from above...

Lumani had never managed a failed delivery because, in the end, no matter how skilled or how hard they fought back, pressure applied in the right places caused even the strongest men to fracture.But this one? He'd watched her. Studied her. Observed what maybe even Uncle, the reader of people, had missed. This one was already fractured, and the lines between her broken pieces were not fissures but scar material stronger than whatever had once filled those spaces.

Just because you're scarred for life doesn't mean you should be scared to live.

The scars on her face said something different about her, too-that she, like Cyra, knew what she was risking when she risked her life."pg 337

I see a man," she said softly. "A man with the roar of cannons still ringing in his ears. A man bloodied by life, but not beaten. A man with a scar that draws his mouth into a frown when he might actually long to smile.