I guess ghosts don’t actually need hair, but that thought never crossed my mind as I stood on our back patio and stared down at a clump of my own hair lying on the gray concrete. It was Halloween. I think I was eight or nine years old and my thirteen year old sister was helping me make my costume. I had decided to go as a ghost. The costume design process seemed relatively simple. Mom had given us a white bed sheet to work with. All we had to do was throw it over my head and cut out two holes for my eyes. The plan was, to top it off with one of my dad’s old hats and, voila, we were ready to hit the streets and rake in the candy. How could we possibly mess this up? Susan drew a circle in ink where the holes for each of my eyes should go and at least we had the good sense not to cut them right then and there. Had we made that mistake, I might have embodied the fate that was the daily dread of my mother as she constantly reminded us, “Be careful or you’ll poke somebody’s eye out!” I never really put much credence in that dire warning until then. I can’t, for the life of me, figure out why, given that we had the good sense not to cut the sheet while it dangled precariously over my face, we would think it a perfectly logical alternative to whirl it around, leaving it on my body, to cut it from the back. Though it defies explanation, that’s precisely what we did. The very next thing I can remember was staring down, with a very sick feeling in the pit of my stomach, at a sizable section of my still slightly sun-bleached hair, now a casualty of my older sister’s recklessness. I reminded her of this event just yesterday in a text and her response was, “That was awesome! I can still remember my expression when I saw the hair falling!” So this is what I have to work with!
Really, that’s true for each one of us. We each go through life interrupted by the recklessness and incompetence of those around us and sometimes we get maimed in the process. We go through life almost expecting them to fail, joining Janis Joplin on the chorus singing, “Take another little piece of my heart now, Baby!” Just think of what a complete act of confidence and courage it must take for our Creator God, who beautifully conceived of every single thing about us, who intricately knit it all together within the wombs of our individual mothers, only to plop His Masterpiece right down in the middle of humanity. Families, friends, churches, filled with reckless, inadequate people who are perfectly positioned, it might seem, to make a wreck of what He molded into being, without even a second glance. It’s not always evil at the heart of our loss. Sure, this world has its share of wicked, dark, heinous offenders who, with malicious intent, set out to destroy everything and everyone in their path. Yet, more often than not, our wounds come at the hands of those who didn’t set out to hurt us at all, but in their immaturity and insufficiency, they couldn’t help but hurt us anyway. As far as I know, my sister didn’t intentionally cut my hair. Although her “awesome” comment from yesterday may call that theory into question. She just didn’t know what she was doing. She was in way over her head, not to mention mine. What looked like a task she could easily handle resulted in an outcome that came at a total, yet dismal, surprise to both of us. Yet her recklessness didn’t cost her, it cost me. It left me standing there with bangs on the back, not a trend-setting look, by any stretch of the imagination.
What do we do with that? How do we respond to the loss we suffer at the hands of those who let us down? Sometimes the disappointment leaves us fearful, mistrusting, isolated, and alone. Sometimes we get stuck there, when at a moment when we least expected it, we lost something at the hands of someone we love, who now stands before us with their ineptitude starkly exposed. Sometimes we get bitter and miss the grace graffiti God splatters all around us because we refuse to turn our eyes from one clumsy moment. Sometimes we get angry, lashing out to extract the cost of that mistake in the context of every other relationship. Sometimes we fail to love well ever again. David could have become all those things, run the gamut of all that emotion, but instead he wrote these words while he was still under fire,
You see, the thing is, eventually the hair grows back, the wounds heal, the aches subside, because God has us. Every single offense really does become a momentary affliction when we broaden our perspective to see it against the backdrop of God’s everlasting, never-let-you-down kindness. When everyone leaves, He’s still in the room. His mercies start brand new at daybreak. His love never fails. Even when the people around us threaten to drain us dry He is THE DRINK that fills us up to overflowing. I want those around me to love me, I do, but when they fail me, even when it seems they run helter-shelter through my life, because He loves me, I am loved sufficiently no matter what. I can put to death my need for their acceptance, and even their trustworthiness, on the cross of an extravagance of grace. Besides, ghosts don’t actually need hair anyway, right?
MELISSA LLOYD 