On Being Challenged, Follicly

I spent a good deal of time this summer travelling around, seeing people I hadn't seen in a while, some of them not for years. Over and over again, I got feedback on the state of my head hair (or lack thereof). "Whoa, what happened to your hair?" Well, I'll tell you: it went the way of all good things - away from me.
At one point, I was visiting my sister at her college & as we walked out of the building to go to dinner, a pickup truck rolled by & a teenager of some sort yelled out the window, "Hey you old baldy!" I can only assume that he was yelling at me, since my sister still possesses her full head of hair.

I wanted to put a picture here of a kid yelling out the window of a car, but instead I found this picture of a meat mug, full of gravy. Mmmmm, greasy gravy glopping down my gullet. 

This reminded me of a bible story which is no doubt already intimately familiar to most balding Christians: 2 Kings 2:23-24, which is as follows -

            From there Elisha went up to Bethel. While he was on the way, some small boys 

            came out of the city and jeered at him. “Go up, baldhead,” they shouted, “go up, 

            baldhead!” 24 The prophet turned and saw them, and he cursed them in the name 

            of the LORD. Then two she-bears came out of the woods and tore forty-two of the 

            children to pieces.

I related this story to my sister and we laughed and waited expectantly for the bears to come, but the pickup just drove around the decidedly and remarkably bear-less corner. Maybe the bears were waiting back at their house.

I did find some riculawesome art for this incident, but I think this one is my favorite. Just look at how cuddly those bears are! And how terribly, terribly eviscerated all of those children are.

Anyways, on to the moral meat (for the mug meat, refer back to the picture at the top of this post): Prematurely balding is an issue when it comes to our culture of youth and vanity. Way back when I was in the seminary and my balding was beginning to become evident, a friend of mine asked why I didn't start using Propecia or the like. "After all," he remarked, "your lack of hair could become a barrier between you and your future parishioners." Luckily, I eventually withdrew from formation, so I've never had to test his hypothesis, but as absurd as it was, there is some resonance to it, though perhaps the other way around.

The truth is that while I was embarrassed by being called bald by a complete stranger and any number of my friends and family, I was also thankful. This will sound ridiculous, of course, but here it is: after getting yelled at on the corner, it occurred to me that these small humiliations could be gathered up and offered to God. Once that thought was planted in my brain, I kept revisiting the memory to keep revisiting the shame & keep offering it up. Granted, this is really only a very small amount of shame, but it reminds me of my finitude, which is really the great project that God has before Him with each of us.

With most men, it's a waiting game, hoping to hold on to whatever hair they can until they reach a "dignified" age & can finally throw that old toupee away.

Huh. Evidently a brand new toupee is only around $90. Maybe I should stop writing and start ordering my dignity back.

The thing is that with God, there is no waiting game, not from His end, anyway. God is the eternal Now who sees our past, present, and future all at once. To God, our past blessings and future graces are all being given at once. Being in time allows us to revisit our past graces (like being made fun of in front of my sister) and anticipate in hope the future blessings God intends for us, while trying to allow the current evidences of God's presence & love to break our hearts of stone.

So what does all of that have to do with balding? Depending on the person, a whole lot. If I understand that it is God's purpose to form me into the image of His Son and I also understand that it is mainly my pride that gets in the way of participating in that salvation, I can embrace every little humiliation God graciously grants to me and live in the hope of the day when I will definitively live forth Christ's life, even if this is not fully accomplished until Heaven. A good friend of mine recently remarked that God's desire is bring us into union with Himself, and will therefore give us whatever sufferings and humiliations necessary to accomplish that. Whatever amount of suffering and humiliation we are not seeking on our own, God will graciously offer to us. So from that perspective, prematurely losing my hair is capable of being a humiliation which makes up for some of the suffering and self-death that I avoid in my pride and fear (and there is a whole lot that I avoid). In this sense, it is a great blessing, and one which is undoubtedly necessary for me and the breaking of my pride. In this sense, all of those little things that we hate about our own bodies may in fact be very very small avenues to the salvation that God longs for for each of us. 

That being said, I am no saint yet. I still like to imagine myself with considerably more hair than I have, or only from the forehead down.

Could our salvation in fact come through the physical? Are even our own bodies bound up in God's plan for our good, and not our woe? Undoubtedly.