When Your One Beauty Goes Gray ~ #LifeUnmasked

7:00 am By

When I found the first one, I cried.

Me, the woman who has gone through awful breakups without tears.  Who has officiated countless funerals and weddings without so much as water in the eyes.  Me, who prides herself on her ability to contain her composure.  Sobbed.

anxiousIt was my 23rd birthday.  And there it was, in the midst of my long, curly, deep brown hair, a long gray kinky hair.  I pulled it out and held it in my hand.  My hair was the first thing that ever made me feel beautiful.

I grew up a tomboy.  I didn’t know girls were supposed to be beautiful.  Or, at least I didn’t think it important that I clearly wasn’t beautiful.  I had always sported a lovely bowl cut, since I refused to let my mother brush my hair.  I was too busy reading and playing and imagining.  Too busy praying and studying and being close to God.

Finally in middle school I decided I wanted long hair like other girls.  It was high school before my awful bangs grew out and any of my hair touched my shoulders.  It was college before a hairdresser showed me that my hair had decided to forgo the body wave I’d always known and curl.  Overnight I found out I had long, lovely, curly hair.

From that day on, I have pampered it.  I straighten it.  I keep it curly.  I love it.  Anything about me that was or is beautiful is my hair.  It is thick and a lovely deep brown with red highlights.  It is healthy and wonderful and long.  It was what gave me worth and beauty. And now, suddenly, I knew it was going to be gray.  Everything that was beautiful about me, suddenly disappeared.  I crumbled into a heap of tears.

After I regained enough composure to speak, I called my mother.  I sniffed as I told her about this awful reality.  I was too young to color my hair. Her belly laugh shook my soul.  “Oh Emily,” she laughed, “I have been waiting for this day.  I found my first gray hair at 16, and was fairly white by 18.  It’s nothing to cry over.” I quickly got off the phone and cried harder.  I wasn’t ready to be old.  I wasn’t ready for gray hair.

As I’m approaching my 32nd birthday this spring, I look back and still cringe.  You would think by now I’d be used to it.  No, my hair isn’t gray.  I have pulled out only a handful of grays in the years since, but it still scares me. I teach others that they are beautiful because God loves them.  That they are beautiful with gray hair or no hair or dyed pink hair.   And they are worth something because God loves them, not because they are beautiful.  That God’s love makes you beautiful not hair or eyes or weight or teeth.  You would think after saying it so many times I’d believe it.

I’d like to think that the years have taught me that I am beautiful because I am strong.  Because I am smart. Because I am loved.  And some days I believe it.  But then there are the days when I find that pesky, out of place gray hair, and I wonder.  Will anyone love me with gray hair?  Will anyone think I’m beautiful if it was gone?

That’s when I stop letting my fears and anxiety take control.  I take a deep breath in, pull the pesky hair out and throw it in the toilet with the other negative thoughts.  For I am beautiful—not because the hair on my head, but because of the God who knows how many hairs there are.

Emily Case

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Today’s Life:Unmasked post comes from Rev. Emily Case, the Associate Pastor at Kennesaw United Methodist just outside Atlanta, Georgia. She leads the unconventional Revive Worship Service and tweets as @PastorEMJ. Believing that the God’s light can shine in the darkest places, she is sure that if we love God and love people, that everything else is just details. She spends her free time talking to and giggling with strangers and friends at Starbucks. She’s simply a single girl trying to love and pray her way through life.

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Life: unmasked buttonOn Wednesdays I host a little link-up in which we take off our everything’s-FINE false front and write naked. We share how our humanness, our flaws, and our weaknesses are teaching us about life and maturity and wisdom.

If you’ve written anything unmasked lately, link it here (direct link please) and please do include a link back to this post so your readers can find the link-up too. Then please visit at least two others and leave a comment to encourage them.

 

Filed UnderFaith and Doubt, Life: unmasked 4 Comments

“The Evangelical Protestant mind has never relished complexity.”

7:50 pm By

I’ve been thinking about thinking lately. How do I think differently from a woman living 100 years ago? 1000 years ago? Before the time of Christ? What categories am I lacking? How does that limit my ability to really grasp what is being said in old and ancient writing? What are my blind spots and weaknesses? How can one find that out if they are, in fact, blind to them?

To help think these things through, I’ve been reading as much as I can. (Confession: I have at least six books going right now. But I’m delighted to say that I’ve finished quite a number in the last couple of months, so I don’t just start them and then put them down.) I just started “The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind” by Mark A. Noll and only 15 pages is, he’s kicking my butt. Here’s just a taste:

“To put it most simply, the evangelical ethos is activistic, populist, pragmatic, and utilitarian. It allows little space for broader or deeper intellectual effort because it is dominated by the urgencies of the moment. In addition, habits of mind that in previous generations may have stood evangelicals in good stead have in the twentieth century run amock. As the Canadian scholar N.K. Clifford once aptly summarized the matter: ‘The Evangelical Protestant mind has never relished complexity. Indeed its crusading genius, whether in religion or politics, has always tended toward an over-simplification of issues and the substitution of inspiration and zeal for critical analysis and serious reflection. The limitations of such a mind-set were less apparent in the relative simplicity of a rural frontier society.’

“Recently two very good, but also very disquieting, books have illustrated the weaknesses of evangelical intellectual life. Both are from historians who teach at the University of Wisconsin. Ronald Numbers’s book The Creationists (Knopf, 1992) explains how a popular belief known as “creationism” –a theory that the earth is ten thousand or less years old — has spread like wildfire in our century from its humble beginnings in the writings of Ellen Whit, the founder of Seventh-day Adventism, to its current status as a gospel truth embraced by tens of millions of Bible-believing evangelicals and fundamentalists around the world. Paul Boyer’s When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture (Harvard University Press, 1992) documents the remarkable popularity among American Bible-believing Christians — again mostly evangelicals and fundamentalists — of radical apocalyptic speculation. Boyer concludes that Christian fascination with the end of the world has existed for a very long time, but also that recent evangelical fixation on such matters — where contemporary events are labeled with great self-confidence as the fulfillment of biblical prophecies heralding the End of Time — has been particularly intense.”

From “The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind” by Mark A. Noll

I see myself in those words. I’ve only recently grown an appreciation for complexity, nuances, shades of grade (or color), and I still prefer things to be straightforward. I dive in first, think later. Also, I was shocked to discover the roots of creationism.

What about you? What do you think about thinking and our particular weaknesses and blind spots today?

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Filed UnderCritical Thinking, Faith and Doubt 11 Comments

It’s Okay To Stop Praying ~ Life Unmasked

7:00 am By

I stood slowly after the closing prayer. The long sit on hard wooden pews had stiffened my muscles. I rubbed my back as I slid sideways into the aisle. My mother-in-law motioned me to stay put.

“I’ll go get the kids.”

As I gathered up Bibles, papers, and bags, an older lady approached. “Joy, I just love to watch Elli while you and Scott sing. It makes her so happy.”

I never know what to say in situations like these, so I just smiled at her. Elli’s face shone and the joy in her soul exploded from her entire body when she heard music she loved.

She continued. “I pray every day for Elli to be healed.”

My smile froze. Elli was five years old. She had a permanent brain injury from lack of oxygen. Her heart hadn’t formed right. How could she be healed of that? These weren’t ongoing processes that could stop or reverse. It simply was.

“Oh! Well, thank you,” I managed. I knew her intention was good.

As we rolled Elli down the wheelchair ramp and into the sunny parking lot, the second-guessing started. Mother-guilt, my old faithful companion, back again. Had I failed her? Was my faith weak? Should I be asking God to heal her?

Then the thought (maybe it was from the Holy Spirit?). I need to accept our circumstances as they are today. Praying for healing would feed my discontent, my anger, my resentment, and my clamor for relief from the suffering.

I realized that it’s ok to stop praying for something. I hadn’t stopped praying altogether. I asked God for help to be a good mother to a child who couldn’t talk to me, feed herself, or walk. I asked for wisdom for the doctors treating her. I asked for help not to waste my scant energy on worthless activities like worry.

That didn’t mean it was wrong for others to pray for different things, like for Elli to be healed. I could thank this dear lady for her prayers and genuinely appreciate them as a gift of love from her to us. But it was no reflection on me, my effectiveness as a mother, or my faith in God, that I could not join her in that prayer.

This past week, I read the following in the book “The Heart of Prayer: What Jesus Teaches Us” by Jerram Barrs. I had never read or heard anything like it before. It speaks directly to our experience with our daughter.

“We do not know the precise nature of the thorn in the flesh with which the apostle Paul wrestled–whether it was a physical malady or some other problem. In this particular case, Paul tells us that he prayed three times that his thorn in the flesh would be taken away. And then he stopped praying for the thorn’s removal, but this was because he sensed God telling him that he would have to endure the thorn (2 Cor. 12:7-10). Paul had to be ready for a different kind of perseverance, and to be willing to persist in different prayers from those for healing. His calling was to pray for grace to endure the thorn, to pray for God’s strength to sustain him in his ongoing weakness.”

Have you ever stopped praying for something? Why or why not?

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Life: unmasked buttonOn Wednesdays we gather to share our unmasked moments from the week. We take off the everything’s-FINE false front and share what we are learning in our humanness, our flaws, our weakness. We believe that it is more encouraging and more real to offer comfort and hope from a place of shared struggle than from a place of perfection.

If you’ve written anything unmasked lately, link it here (direct link please). Then please visit at least two others and leave a comment of support for them.

This post contains an affiliate link.

Filed UnderElli, Faith and Doubt, Life: unmasked, Special Needs 17 Comments
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