On my 21st birthday, I decided to enact a drastic life change, one that would announce to the world and to myself what a grown-up woman I was becoming. For a few months before that December day, I thought that God felt like I was too preoccupied on my appearance. More specifically, I thought that God felt like I spent too much time and money on my elbow-length curtain of gloriously long hair (which, in all fairness, was probably true), and was - hyperbolically - requiring me to undergo an ancient ritual hair-cutting-off-ceremony in order to pass into the realm of womanhood. Coincidentally, my grandmother had just undergone a series of chemotherapy for her cancer and had, like most chemo patients, lost all her hair, and had bought a hairpiece from a company who created wigs from donated hair.
So, being an extremely literal person, I cut off my hair.
The way I figured it, the physical transformation of removing 16 inches of shiny, swinging, light brown wonderfulness would effect an inner transformation of my attitude about appearances and would instantly create me into a more spiritually attuned and charitable person, because I donated those 16 inches to the same company where my grandmother bought her wig.
Oh man, was I wrong.
This life-altering haircut, the one meant to release me from obsession over beauty, turned out to be....a mullet.
The first time my boyfriend saw me post-haircut, he blurted out that I looked like a soccer mom from the eighties. Children stared at me as I walked back to my car, and as I looked into the rearview mirror at my business-in-the-front, party-in-the-back head, I burst into tears.
Traumatic Life Moment #11 had just occurred. The hair (or lack thereof) was bad, but the realization that I cared just as much as ever what I looked like was even worse. Instead of being enlightened, I was even more shallow than I had realized, more superficial than I could have imagined, and - worse yet - I now resembled Billy Ray Cyrus. I was no closer to God with a mullet than I was without, and certainly less confident that I had heard Him correctly on the whole "Cut your hair and get your priorities in check" deal.
A bit dramatic, yes. But I was seriously questioning things, now that my head was free of any burden of follicly-enhanced beauty and my heart was open to the other options that God was throwing my way.
Because it never occurred to me that God didn't care at all what I looked like, or what I did with my hair, and He wouldn't know what to do with a hairdryer if it hit Him in the face. Maybe, just maybe, the image of spending time and money on something so insignificant as hair was pointing to a larger truth of how we utilize our resources in the face of our excess and someone else's poverty.
Still think I'm being dramatic? No apologizes here.
Sometimes God guides us through traumatic experiences to upset our self-oriented mentalities and uses the big picture of a death or break-up to show us how to orient ourselves to His truth - but I'm convinced that sometimes He highlights the little things (like spending a small fortune on coffees, or slamming doors when we're angry, or white-lying) to snap our hearts and minds back into action, back into realizing that every. single. thing. impacts other people.
That $4 you non-chalantly pay for a large caffiene-chino with an extra helping of child-labor-produced sugar?
Those 15 minutes you spend on Facebook, Twitter, or MySpace every morning?
That new phone, the one you're going to buy once you save up enough?
And yet we frown and shake our heads when the pastor challenges us to find time each day to spend quiet moments with God, and we duck away when a homeless man begs us for money, any money, any spare change he can have. How many times a day have we ignored the people and places who could ask us to share our resources? The smaller my paychecks get, the more I realize that "I don't have enough to give" is never an option. You have yourself. You have your attention to give, your time to give, your love of baking, your talent for fixing cars, your listening ears, your willing attitude to give, and there are literally millions of people who are begging for what you have to offer.
This, I have found, was the real lesson behind the mullet for Jesus.
So yes, if God again asks me to do something as ridiculous as cut my hair - or to give up makeup, or quit drinking from plastic bottles, or to buy only locally-produced, fair-trade, recycled, pre-owned, or do to completely without - I will do it. It doesn't matter if I see the result of my action - the fact is, God does see the results, and not just of my actions, but of all our actions combined. That can either be terrifying or rejuvenating - all depending on what our actions are, of course.
Now that's something to think about.
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