Trimming Despair

I don't know why it didn't occur to me sooner. All I had to do was part my hair on the right instead of on the left, flop the bangs over the most disgusting healing freeze wounds, and no one would ever need to know that I had had an extended encounter with a dermatologist.

I went to church and interacted with people who had no idea what lurked under my bangs. I didn't feel the need to wear a burka anymore. I could show myself in public again, without evoking piteous glances.

Asherel had the opposite problem. She had a beautiful young face with bangs that were falling over her eyes. Given the horrific results of her last haircut, she was adamant that no hairdresser would touch anything but her bangs. She has seen the result of my own self clipping and wanted no part of me playing hairdresser for a day either. I was hoping that if we could get her to a good hairdresser, she might fix all the uneven mess left by the last one. I hoped she would also be well trained in psychology because I had not been able to persuade Asherel that sometimes cutting more off, just a little more, made the whole cut work.

We went to a hairdresser that had cut Asherel's hair years ago. The hairdresser had a parrot and this was a huge draw for Asherel. As we headed out, I was thinking of the sweet lady I often sit behind in church. Over the years, I have come to know her and knew that one of the tormenting struggles in her life was an estranged daughter. The daughter married a man that seems to have poisoned her against her family. This time, as I caught up with my friend in the few minutes before church, I found out the man has bipolar illness. And he doesn't take his medicine, because he doesn't like the way it makes him feel. The family had only found this out recently, after two years of enduring the distancing daughter, and the hateful son in law.
"So what do I do?" mourned my friend, "Her birthday is coming but how can I invite her over with him? He is so hateful."
"You know, it is probably the disease you are seeing, not him," I said, "Someone he trusts needs to convince him to take the medicine."
Church started and I sat in my pew praying for the poor sad situation.

I snapped back to the present dilemma as the hairdresser, Carla, approached.
"Who needs a haircut?" she asked, "Ah you!" She looked markedly at me with my new part and sideswept bangs concealing a forehead of horrors. She looked perilously close to touching my festering forehead.
"NO, her!" I exclaimed thrusting Asherel forward.
"The last hairdresser cut off all her beautiful hair far shorter than she wanted, and look at how uneven and well.... can you do anything to help it?"
"And cut off my bangs," said Asherel.
"Oh you poor thing!" cried Carla. (This is a woman after my own heart, one who understands the trauma of a bad haircut.)
"Come with me," she cooed, putting her arm around Asherel," I can make this better. And I promise, I will not cut one millimeter off than I have to."
She spent an hour on the cut. Midway through she came in my direction to get supplies and whispered, "That last cut was so uneven! Was the hairdresser blindfolded?"
"Is she letting you shape it?" I asked.
"Oh yes," smiled Carla, "It is going to be beautiful."
And it was.
"This is soooo much less annoying!" said Asherel to me as she walked over with the beaming Carla, who knew she had produced a small miracle.
Less annoying. Not what I am usually going for when I slap down money for a haircut, but high praise from my daughter.

And of course the two big traumas of the day had a similar message- the angry, disturbed young man who refused to take his medicine and  didn't realize how a whole family of tortured people was unraveling with this decision,  and the head of unruly hair that just needed a loving and compassionate loss of a few carefully snipped millimeters to be harmonious and lovely. Sometimes when the world is spinning out of control, in big issues like the bipolar husband, or little things like curly hair that flies off every which way, it is easiest to just hunker down, grit your teeth, and try to stay the course through sheer will power and time. But sometimes, it is best to do what you don't want to do, to let someone who perhaps has experience, and maybe knows better, to administer what you don't understand you need.

I think faith is sometimes like that. It was for me anyway. I came to belief in Jesus with much kicking, and fighting, and screaming. And as soon as I angrily cried out that I believed, but that my belief was very very small, and my doubt was very very great.... I felt something monumental had changed within me. It wasn't that famous sense of peace- that has only slowly grown in me. But it was an instantaneous love of people. I felt for perhaps the first time in my life compassion for all us wretched souls trying so desperately to make it in a cranky world. And now that I have faith, I would never ever go back to a life of unbelief. I had no idea how badly I needed it, in fact fought against it. I shake my head bewildered over that, given what I know now.

Asherel walked beside me, her shining cap of glossy beautiful hair dancing on her head.
"What are you looking at?" she said, but smiling.
The small miracles that I hope portend big ones, I thought.

Isaiah 18: 4-6
⁴ This is what the LORD says to me:
   “I will remain quiet and will look on from my dwelling place,
like shimmering heat in the sunshine,
   like a cloud of dew in the heat of harvest.”
⁵ For, before the harvest, when the blossom is gone
   and the flower becomes a ripening grape,
he will cut off the shoots with pruning knives,
   and cut down and take away the spreading branches.
⁶ They will all be left to the mountain birds of prey
   and to the wild animals;
the birds will feed on them all summer,
   the wild animals all winter. 

Romans 11:23-25

²³ And if they do not persist in unbelief, they will be grafted in, for God is able to graft them in again. ²⁴ After all, if you were cut out of an olive tree that is wild by nature, and contrary to nature were grafted into a cultivated olive tree, how much more readily will these, the natural branches, be grafted into their own olive tree!