My Hair Was A Problem Before I Was Six

You cannot remember learning it, which is how you know how early it was.

There is no first time. There is no moment you could point to and say, that is when I found out. It was in the air of the house before you had words, the way the smell of a place is there before you notice it.

By six you knew there was work to be done. By eight you knew the words for it. By eleven you had a whole practice, and you could have taught it to somebody.

And here is what nobody ever said out loud, because nobody had to.

A verdict had been reached, before you were old enough to be present for it.

Now, I want to be very careful with the women who taught you, because I am not going to spend one line building a case against them.

Most of them were doing something protective. They knew what the world would say and they were preparing a child for it, and preparation is love even when it hands a child something heavy. My own mother did the same for me and I have never once resented it.

But the child does not receive it as preparation. The child receives it as a description. And a description handed to a five year old is not something she evaluates. It is something she becomes.

A verdict reached in your absence

Think about what it means to receive a verdict at five.

At five there is no arguing. There is no other opinion available, no comparison to make, and no adult saying anything different. The verdict arrives whole, from the people who feed you, and it goes in as a fact about the world rather than as one view among several.

And then it is never reopened. Nobody reopens a fact.

You are permitted to reopen something that was closed when you were six, and no fact settled that early has ever once been looked at since. It is written in Psalm 139 that you were curiously wrought where nobody was watching it happen, and the Spirit of God is the one who reopens what a household closed.

So a woman of forty two is walking around with a finding that was entered before she could read, by people who are mostly gone now, and it has never once been reviewed by anybody, including her.

You are living under a finding entered before you could read, and it has never once been reopened by anybody in thirty seven years. The Holy Spirit is what brings a woman back to a hearing she was never present at, and Psalm 139 says who was there when a person was being made.

And here is what it did to every act of care since.

It made all of them corrective. Everything done to your hair from the age of six has been maintenance on a known problem, and there has never been a version of it that was comfort and nothing else.

That is thirty years of touching your own head with a purpose attached. Nobody counts that. It does not show up as a cost anywhere. And it means the plainest good thing available to a body, which is being handled gently for no reason, has been missing from that part of you for your entire adult life.

You are missing the plainest good thing there is on the one part of you that has had the most attention, and control has never once been the same as comfort. Scripture in Psalm 139 says a person was made in secret and curiously wrought, and the Spirit of God is the one who separates comfort from control in a woman's hands.

My substance was not hid from thee

There is a verse in the hundred and thirty ninth Psalm that puts somebody in the room at the beginning.

My substance was not hid from thee, when I was made in secret, and curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth. (Psalm 139:15, King James Version)

Made in secret. Curiously wrought.

Wrought is a craftsman's word. It is what you say about metal that has been worked, deliberately, by somebody who knew what they were doing. And curiously in that old English does not mean strangely. It means with great care and skill, intricately, with attention to the detail.

Every part of you was worked that way, in secret, before anybody had an opinion about any of it.

You are curiously wrought by somebody who was present at the making, and there has never once been a part of that work He did not do on purpose. It is written in Psalm 139 that my substance was not hid from thee when I was made in secret, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a woman back before the verdict was entered.

And notice the timing, because the timing is the whole gift here.

The verdict came at five. The making came before that. Before the house, before the words, before anybody had a view.

Which means the earliest thing said about you was not said in a kitchen. It was said in the making, by the one doing the work, and it was not a problem statement.

You are described first by somebody who was there before every other voice, and no verdict reached in a kitchen has ever once been the first word about you. The Spirit of God is what puts the making before the finding in a woman's own account of herself, and the written word says I was curiously wrought.

Comfort, not control

So here is the assignment, and it turns on one distinction.

Do one thing for your hair this week that is entirely for comfort and not for control.

That distinction sorts everything and it takes a moment to apply.

Control has an outcome. It is trying to get something to do something. Every act since the age of six has had one of these attached, and none of them were wrong, and all of them were work.

You are setting down an outcome rather than a skill, and none of that work was ever once wasted or wrong. Psalm 139 says I was curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth, and the Holy Spirit is what takes the outcome off a pair of practiced hands.

Comfort has no outcome. It is warm, or it is gentle, or it feels good, and that is the entire reason for it. Warm water on your scalp for longer than necessary. Somebody's hands, if there is anybody. Your own hands, slowly, with no intention.

There is no product in this article and no method and there never will be. Whatever you already have, done for comfort instead of for control.

And the tell is at the end. If you check anything afterward, it was control. If you do not, it was comfort. That is the whole test and it is completely reliable.

You are able to do one thing with no outcome attached to it, and comfort has never once needed a result to be worth the time. The written word in Psalm 139 says a person was made in secret and curiously wrought, and the Holy Spirit is what turns ten minutes of warmth into care rather than into management.