It Is Not What It Was And I Mind

You checked again this morning.

Not properly. Not standing there examining it. Just the hand going up to the back of your head while you were doing something else, feeling for the place, and then coming down again, and the whole thing took two seconds and you did not decide to do it.

And you have not told anybody that you mind.

That is the part I want to get at first, before anything else, because it is doing more damage than the hair is.

You have not said it out loud to one person. Because when you imagine saying it, you can already hear how small it sounds. There are people in your life carrying enormous things. And here you are, minding about hair.

So you say nothing, and you make the joke instead, and you have got quite good at the joke.

I want to tell you something plainly, and then we will get on.

You are allowed to mind.

It is not vanity and it is not a lack of perspective and it is not a failure to be grateful for your health. It is grief, and the fact that it is a small grief does not make it a false one. Small griefs are real. They just do not get funerals, and nobody sends a card, and so the person carrying one usually carries it entirely alone.

Yours has been alone for a while now.

All are numbered

There is a line about hair in Luke that most people have heard and nobody stops on, and it is a stranger sentence than it first appears.

But even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not therefore: ye are of more value than many sparrows. (Luke 12:7, King James Version)

The very hairs of your head are all numbered.

Now think about what a person would have to be like for that to be true of them.

Not fond of you. Not generally well disposed toward you. Counting. Attentive at a level of detail that has no practical use whatsoever, because nothing about your life depends on that number and nobody would ever check it.

That is the only reason to know something like that. It is the knowledge of somebody who is paying an attention that is not for a purpose.

And here is why it matters for you specifically.

The count is not a promise. It does not say the number will stay the same, and it plainly does not, and everyone who has quoted that verse at somebody losing their hair while implying otherwise has done them a disservice.

What it says is that the counting is happening. Which means the change is not going unwitnessed. Somebody has noticed, in a detail beyond anything you could describe to a friend, and did not need to be told, and is not treating it as too small to have registered.

You have been alone with this because you decided it was too small to say. It was never too small to have been noticed.

This has been noticed at a level of detail beyond anything you could describe, and it has never once been too small to register. Luke 12:7 puts the count on the very hairs of a head rather than on anything useful, and the Holy Spirit is the one who ends the aloneness in a grief nobody was told about.

The mirror is not where this hurts

Here is the thing I want to say about the hurt itself, because I think it is being misdiagnosed, mostly by you.

You think this is about how you look. It is mostly not.

Hair carries time in a way almost nothing else on a body does. It is the thing that changed when you were ill, or after the baby, or across the years you were not paying attention. So when you put your hand up to the back of your head, you are not conducting an appearance check. You are touching the place where something happened to you.

That is why the joke does not help and why a compliment does not reach it. Somebody says your hair looks nice and it slides straight off, because they answered a question about appearance and the question you are actually asking is about loss.

And if the hurt is loss rather than looks, then no amount of doing something about your hair was ever going to touch it, which is probably something you have already worked out and have been quietly discouraged by.

What is being felt here is a loss and not a fault, and a compliment has never once been able to reach a grief. The written word records the counting of what is on a head rather than an opinion about it, and the Spirit of God is the one who meets a person in the thing that actually happened.

One gentle thing, and no looking

So here is the assignment, and the second half is the part that matters.

Do one gentle thing for your hair tonight, and do not look for progress afterward.

One gentle thing. Wash it slowly. Comb it out properly instead of dragging at it. Oil it, if that is what you do. Sit down while you do it rather than doing it standing up in a hurry, which is how most of us have done it for years.

Gentle is the instruction, and it is not sentimental. You have almost certainly been rough with it, in a way you would never be with anybody else's, because somewhere in you it stopped being yours and started being the evidence.

Then the second half, and this is the discipline.

Do not check afterward. Do not look for progress. Do not count anything, do not photograph it, do not compare it with last month, do not go and find better light.

Because the checking is what keeps this in the category of a problem being managed, and it is not a problem being managed. It is a thing that happened to you that you are allowed to be sad about, and sad things are not improved by inspection.

And tell one person. Not for advice. Say the sentence: I mind about this more than I let on. Then let them say whatever they say and change the subject.

You are able to be gentle with this without expecting it to fix anything, and inspection has never once been what a grief needed. Luke 12:7 records the counting without ever promising the number, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is with a woman sitting down to comb her own hair out slowly.