Every Scar Tells a Story: Forgiveness, Truth, and the Strength of Avonley Lightstone’s Wounds

For most of us, scars are something we hide.

We cover them with clothing or makeup. We avoid talking about the experiences that left them. We work very hard to appear “fine.”

So when someone like Avonley Lightstone steps into the open and names her scars—burn scars from a fire at age three, emotional scars from being abandoned, and deep psychological scars from years of abuse in an adoptive home—it’s not just an act of self-expression. It’s an act of service.

And in her case, it became an act of forgiveness.

Not the cheap, slogan version of forgiveness that says “just move on.” The kind that wrestles honestly with harm, refuses to pretend it didn’t happen, and still finds a way to release the burden.

Avonley’s book is called Strength of Scars. The title isn’t just poetic; it’s descriptive. Her scars have, in fact, become strong—not by disappearing, but by being woven into a different kind of story.

A Childhood Marked by Fire, Abandonment, and “A Better Life”

Avonley’s story starts in India, in a crowded Catholic family with nine children—one boy and eight girls.

At three years old, she was alone in the house with her mother, who was cooking over an open flame. Her mother’s sari caught fire. Panicking, her mother screamed. Little Avonley ran to wake her father, who had passed out drunk and wouldn’t respond.

So the three-year-old did what three-year-olds do: she ran back to her mother and hugged her.

They burned together.

Her mother tried to push her away, but she wouldn’t let go. By the time her father finally woke—startled by his daughter’s screams—both were badly burned. In the hospital, Avonley was left to “air dry and heal.” Her mother, burned over most of her body, died three days later.

Family members visited for a while. Once her mother died, they stopped coming. The first deep wound, beyond the physical burns, was rejection.

When she was finally discharged from the hospital, her father took her not home, but to an orphanage. She remembers the surreal sequence: paying respects to Mother Mary in her little blue underwear, then being dropped off.

Hospital bed. Shrine. Orphanage.

No transition. No grief time. No explanation.

Eventually, three of her siblings joined her in the orphanage. One—her baby sister—was kept behind because babies were “easier to adopt” to Western families. That separation cut in a different way.

From there, the story takes a turn that looks like “rescue” from the outside. A ranching family in Utah, members of the LDS church, adopted her and two of her siblings into a large, apparently generous home. Over time, they would adopt 14 children in total.

To the community, this looked like compassion in action: a devout family giving orphans “a better life.”

Behind closed doors, it became something else.

When Image Matters More Than Children

The adoptive home was not a sanctuary.

There was physical abuse: a board with nails used for spankings, punishments of three days in a bedroom without food or water, being made to do advanced homework alone in a basement and denied meals until impossible work was done.

There was psychological torment: rooms meticulously cleaned by the children (as they’d been trained in the orphanage) deliberately torn apart by their adoptive mother, only to be called “messy” and ordered to be cleaned again.

There was sexual abuse: an older brother repeatedly raping younger adopted sisters for years; a younger brother later doing the same to the last two girls adopted into the home. When one of those girls developed chronic urinary tract infections and began bedwetting, the response was not medical care—it was humiliation, forcing her to wash her bedding in an icy creek before dawn, even in winter.

And there was complicity:

When Avonley went to her adoptive mother, knocked on the locked bedroom door, and reported that her brother was raping the girls, she was scolded for disturbing her, told “I’ll take care of it,” and nothing changed.
The abuse continued into the girls’ high school years and beyond.
Stories were fabricated to discredit victims so “no one would believe them.”

To the outside world—and to much of their church community—the family remained a model of piety and charity.

This pattern is tragically familiar. When reputation becomes an idol, children become acceptable sacrifices.

It’s one of the reasons I ran a commercial on my show for Protecting Other People’s Children, a book on child protection policies. Policy and training matter. But they only work if there’s a prior decision: the image of God in a child is more important than the image of the institution.

Avonley eventually left that home, got to college, and began to see in sharper relief how different her internal world was from her peers’: skittish, hyper-vigilant, shy to the point of paralysis, always people-pleasing.

She knew something inside was broken.

And then she got married, and something new introduced urgency into the equation.

Learning to Forgive Without Repeating the Story

Five months into marriage, while still in school, Avonley found out she was pregnant.

She was angry with God. She had a plan—finish school, build stability, then have children. Instead, she felt thrown in the deep end, forced to confront a reality she’d been trying to outrun:

“The only mother I knew was my adoptive mother. And I definitely didn’t want to pass that on.”

Motherhood activated both her fear and her instinct to protect. She began an intentional, often lonely healing process:

Writing raw letters to her adoptive mother (never sent) about what had been done.
Journaling, often pouring out memories she’d tried to suppress.
Reading self-help and spiritual books that helped her recognize and challenge the self-sabotaging way she spoke about herself.
Gradually changing that inner language.

During this time, suicidal thoughts stalked her. Trauma doesn’t evaporate simply because we’ve named it. There were nights when the past felt like more than she could carry.

And yet, in the midst of all that, something else began to form: the courage to forgive without pretending.

For her, that looked like trying—more than once—to go back to her adoptive mother and say, in essence:

“This is what has happened.”
“This is where you’re headed if you don’t change.”
“I’m willing not to hold the past against you if we can move forward differently.”

Her mother refused. She wasn’t ready. She did not want to repent, reconcile, or reimagine the story.

That’s when a crucial shift happened in Avonley’s understanding of forgiveness:

“Just because I’m ready to forgive my mom doesn’t mean she’s ready to forgive me. Forgiveness goes on your own terms.”

Forgiveness, for her, did not mean:

Saying it was “okay.”
Erasing the history.
Re-entering a relationship that was still unsafe.

It meant releasing her claim to vengeance, and refusing to let the abuse define her future.

She did what she could: told the truth, offered a path forward, warned of the damage. At a certain point, she recognized she could not make her mother walk it.

She reached a breaking point and told God she couldn’t carry it anymore—the memories, the unhealed relationship, the suicidal pressure.

The impression she sensed in prayer was simple:

You’ve done what I asked. Now give Me the burden.

And then something unexpected happened. She describes it without drama: the suicidal impulses lifted. Not all the pain disappeared. But the sense that her life was unlivable began to dissolve.

Forgiveness, in this telling, is not a magic wand. It’s a reallocation of weight.

It’s saying:

I refuse to let this person’s choices be the center of my gravity anymore.
I will not let bitterness own my imagination.

I’m handing the final verdict to Someone else.

Speaking to God as the Mother She Never Had

Even after that shift, there remained an ache: the absence of a nurturing mother.

In one of the more quietly profound parts of our conversation, Avonley described how, in that period, she sensed God inviting her to do something very specific:

“Talk to Me as if I were the mother you wish you had. Tell Me what you would tell her. Bring Me your exciting news. Bring Me your hard times. Let Me be that for you.”

Whatever your theology, there’s something deeply human about that movement:

Naming a legitimate, unmet need.
Refusing to pretend you don’t have it.
Bringing it, as best you can, into relationship with a Source of love.

She did. Gradually, she began to relate to God as the caring, listening, attuned presence her adoptive mother had not been. That didn’t erase what had happened—that’s not how memory works. But it did begin to rewrite the scripts:

From “I’m alone” to “Someone is with me.”
From “I deserved what happened” to “What happened was wrong, but I am not wrong.”
From “I must repeat what I’ve seen” to “I can choose a new pattern.”

That new pattern became visible in how she raised her three daughters: not perfectly (no parent is), but intentionally, with an eye on her own reactions and a willingness to grow.

Parenting without grandparents in the picture, without extended-family support, has been hard. But she sees, and her daughters are beginning to see, the unexpected gift inside that hardship: they’re learning gratitude for what they do have, and discernment about the kind of family culture they want to build.

Forgiveness, in this story, is not amnesia. It’s alignment: allowing your actions now to be shaped more by who you are becoming than by what was done to you.

Why Telling the Story Matters

For a long time, Avonley assumed the best she could do was survive and keep quiet. She had already “left it behind.” Writing about it felt like going backwards.

When she sensed God nudging her to put it into a book, her answer was basically: No, thank you.

His counter-question, as she heard it, was devastatingly simple:

“You’re doing okay now. You’re able to handle your trauma more easily. Why can’t you use your story to help someone else?”

She couldn’t shake that.

So she returned to old documents—those unsent letters, raw journal entries—and began writing in earnest. Like many who’ve felt “co-authored” in their work, she found herself waking at 2 or 3 a.m., even though she loves (and needs) sleep. Those were the hours when distractions were few and the words flowed.

She describes the process this way:

“Really, He’s the author; I’m the co-author. He just used my story as testimony.”

The impact has already spilled far beyond what she imagined—or wanted.

She had hoped her adoptive family wouldn’t find out for a couple of years. Within months of publication, someone in her hometown saw the book, shared it, and “everyone knew.” Her adoptive mother and some siblings are angry, seeking legal ways to retaliate. She’s handed that, too, over to God.

And yet:

Women in her hometown have reached out to say, “Your brother did this to me, and nobody believed me.”
Her older sister—the “golden child” who was also abused and had shut down her memories in bitterness—has started reading and said, “I don’t know what it is, but I think God is healing me through your book.”
Readers who’ve never met her are seeing their own scars differently, recognizing patterns in their lives, and beginning their own forgiveness journeys.

When she titled the book Strength of Scars, it was with a theological echo: “Even the perfect man has scars, and he shows them.” His story is still changing lives. In a very human way, ours can too.

Sneak Peek from Tuesday’s Show

On Tuesday on Created in the Image of God, I was joined by Tom Krattenmaker—a writer and commentator on religion in public life, and the author of several acclaimed books, including Confessions of a Secular Jesus Follower. In recent years, Tom has focused on articulating positive secular values and exploring how the natural world can be a source of meaning, purpose, and ethical guidance—not only for secular people, but for everyone.

We talk about:

What draws a secular thinker to Jesus’ teachings.
How our media and rhetoric feed off polarization and incentivize us to do the worst things to one another.
Whether a shared ethical vision is still possible in a society this divided.

If you’ve ever wondered how a serious secular thinker can engage deeply with Jesus, or what common ground might look like between believers and non-believers in public life, you should check out the episode on YouTube. And I’ll be writing about it here, later this week.

See you there.