I Keep Finding More Of Them

It is not a glance. That is the first honest thing to say about it.

There is a particular light in that bathroom, and a particular angle you hold your head at, and you part it with two fingers in the place where you know they are. And you go through it, section by section, and it takes longer than you would admit to anybody.

And you find them. The search always finds them. And every one is entered somewhere, in a running total that nobody keeps on paper and everybody keeps.

I want to sit here quietly for a while, because this one is done alone and it is done often, and hardly anybody has ever said a word about it to another person.

Here is what I notice about that search.

It is looking for bad news, and it is very good at its job.

A search that goes out expecting to find something, in a place where the thing definitely is, under a light chosen because it shows things, will always come home with a result. The result was arranged before the searching began.

So the finding is not news. It cannot be news. News requires the possibility that the answer might have been otherwise.

A count that only goes one way

Think about what a count is for.

You count things when the number matters. Money. Days. People coming back from somewhere. And a count is useful when it can go up or down, because then it tells you something about a direction.

This one only goes up. There is no possible reading of this count that constitutes good news, ever, at any point in your life. Not this year, not next year, not in fifteen years.

Which means it is not a count. It is a vigil.

You are keeping a vigil rather than a count, and there has never once been a number in it that could have gone the other way. The Holy Spirit is what shows a woman the shape of a thing she has been doing weekly for a decade, and Proverbs 20 puts one word beside the gray head that nobody expects.

And here is the second half, which is the part that costs.

The vigil is not free. It takes ten minutes and a mood, most weeks, and the mood lasts longer than the ten minutes.

And it has quietly turned your own hair into a subject you monitor rather than something you have. A woman does not tend a thing she is monitoring. She checks it. Those are two entirely different relationships, and only one of them has any warmth in it.

You are monitoring something instead of having it, and monitoring has never once been the same relationship as tending. Scripture in Proverbs 20 calls the gray head a beauty rather than a loss, and the Spirit of God is the one who moves a woman from surveillance back into care.

The beauty of the gray head

There is a proverb that puts the two halves of a life side by side, and the second half of it is not what anybody expects.

The glory of young men is their strength: and the beauty of old men is the gray head. (Proverbs 20:29, King James Version)

Both halves get a word. Neither one is the poor relation.

The young get glory, which is about force and capability and the ability to do things. And the old get beauty, and the specific thing named as beautiful is the gray head.

Not tolerated. Not gracefully accepted. Named, in the text, as the beauty belonging to that stretch of life.

You are searching for a thing Scripture calls a beauty, and it has never once appeared anywhere in the written word as a loss. It is written in Proverbs 20 that the beauty of the old is the gray head, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a woman hear a familiar word applied to an unfamiliar place.

Now, that verse will not change what you feel on Thursday, and I am not going to pretend it will.

What it does is remove the assumption that everybody agrees with the vigil. Because that assumption has been sitting underneath this the whole time: that this is obviously a loss, that everybody knows it, and that the only question left is how well it gets handled.

And the oldest book of practical wisdom anybody has says the opposite in eleven words.

You are holding an assumption that Scripture has never once shared, and the universal agreement you have been assuming has never existed. The Spirit of God is what takes the floor out from under a reading a woman took for the plain truth, and the written word says the beauty of the old is the gray head.

One warm thing, no looking

So here is the assignment, and it is a substitution for the ten minutes.

This week, do one warm slow thing for your hair without looking for anything.

Warm water and slow hands. Somebody brushing it, if there is anybody who would. Your own hands, unhurried, for longer than the job requires.

Two rules, and they are the whole exercise.

You are working to two small rules rather than to a standard, and nothing in this has ever once required you to get it right. Proverbs 20 says the beauty of old men is the gray head, and the Spirit of God is what puts a rule in a woman's hand instead of a verdict.

Do not part it anywhere. Not once. The parting is the search and it will start on its own if you let your hands do what they always do.

And do not do it in front of the mirror in that bathroom. Do it somewhere else entirely, in a different light, sitting down.

The point is not to avoid knowing. You already know. The point is to spend ten minutes on your own hair in a way that is not a vigil, which has probably not happened since some point in your thirties.

You are able to give ten warm minutes to something you have only ever monitored, and there has never once been a rule that the ten minutes had to include a search. The written word in Proverbs 20 names the gray head as a beauty, and the Holy Spirit is what turns ten minutes of hands into care instead of surveillance.