Monday, July 24, 2017

It is always hard jumping back into a blog post because there is always so much that has happened since the last time that I posted. We have had a pretty major change in our family in the last month, but there is another sort of change that has inspired this post this morning. I cut my hair yesterday. I know life shattering isn't it? I know it seems so trivial, but the truth is the Lord revealed something to me that I have never really thought about.
I love my hair. We have made some memories over my 39 years. It actually started the moment I was being born and the doctor told my mom that I had a full set of black hair. Given the fact that my brother and sister who came before me were both bald headed, I think my mom made a comment to the doctor about if he was sure I was hers. My very first compliment was about my hair! I lived my young life with nice thick hair. Sometimes it was long and sometimes it was cut short.  My Pawpaw used to call me Pete Rose because I had the bowl cut like his. It was go through stages of being curly and being straight.
When I was in 7th grade my hair would barely miss a traumatic event when my best friend and I decided to fix each other's hair. We were at her house and we grabbed a bunch of hair products from under the bathroom since and we had a great time doing our hair. A few hours would pass and I noticed that my friend had a piece of fuzz or something in her bangs. I grabbed the piece of fuzz and to my horror I had also pulled a handful of her hair out! We had used Nair hair removing mousse on our hair!! We ran to the basement and started rinsing our hair out in the sink and shower down there and my friend's bang had completely fallen out. To this day I believe that the thickness of my hair saved from baldness.
I would go through some years of bad hair (who didn't), but when I was a freshman in high school I had decided to get a perm to help define my curls a little more. Well, it turned out terrible. It was so kinky curling and I was horrified. My mom and I went to McDonald's after I had it done and I was just weeping because I just knew that everyone was staring at me. This event would usher in the year of the great banana clip. Seriously, I wore a banana clip every day and it saved whatever dignity I had left. By the time I was a junior this the perm finally fell out 😉 and the craze of straightening your hair became the rage. I would wash my hair at night and spend like 2 hours straightening my hair. I would pull it back gently in my loose Mickey scrunchie and try to sleep as still as possible. I would then wake up early and spend another hour on my hair. The summer before my senior year I went to a salon and had my hair professionally and chemically straightened. I was getting my wisdom teeth out the next day so this worked perfect since I could not wash my hair for a few days. I got my wisdom out and then got sick that night, throwing up and getting chocolate pudding all in my newly straightened hair. By the time I went to college I had mastered the art of getting my hair straight and my curls only make their appearance when I don't have to leave the house or just too lazy to do my hair. In my early 20's when I was diagnosed with cancer I sat in the cancer center and watched woman after woman come in with their hair gone and my anxiety was so high that I had to let Jeremy finish up my paperwork because my hand was shaking so bad. The Lord let me keep my hair.
I kept my hair long until my kids started coming home. A few months before Samuel came home I cut my hair really, really short. Over the years I would grow it out and then cut it short again. When we moved to Chicago my hair was actually cut pretty short, but for the last five years I have let it grow and grow and grow. I feel weird saying this, but I am not sure I have had a bad hair day in like three years. My hair just kept growing and it looked really nice. I would get complements on my hair almost every day from either people I knew or even complete strangers would comment on how beautiful my hair was. But what was happening each time someone said that my hair was beautiful the more I associated my hair with my identity. I started to believe that I was beautiful because my hair was beautiful. My hair was my one and only thing about me that was good (see how crazy that sounds). My hair became my escape. If I could just hide behind this pile of hair on my head, nobody would notice what was underneath, I could hide from the world.
The last few weeks my hair had really been getting on my nerves. I never pull it back (the whole hiding from the world thing, and my extreme anxiety of looking 12 years old) so it was just always so hot on my head. It was bothering me at night because it would make me sweaty and then get wrapped around my neck. The final decision was made yesterday during church when my head was so hot I was about to pass out. After lunch yesterday I went to my bathroom, got my scissors and went to cutting. Remorse soon followed and this morning my previous FB profile picture just sent me to tears. It was silly, irrational, but then the Lord convicted me. I had placed my beauty and worth in my hair. For some reason taking away my one beautiful quality (what I thought) meant that I was now ugly. I had connected my identity to my hair. What about you? What in your life do you see as your identity? When you think about your life what makes you think, "I am beautiful because...?"If it is anything other then the fact that we are beautiful and worthy because we are the daughter of the King then it needs to be addressed. When our worth is placed in other things we go into a downward spiral when we get a haircut, our clothes are out of style, we put on those few pounds, we were not included in that party, and the list could go on. We are beautiful because we are made in the image of the Creator and I will keep reminding myself of that as I wait the next four years for my hair to grow back.

This picture was taken this summer while we were in OK. I just love it!