the story of my own personal idol, and how i shaved it off
i’d used hair clippers countless times, but never imagined i would ever use them on myself.
yet there i was, cutting cape draped over my shoulders, staring at my reflection in the dirty mirror of our dorm bathroom, with those clippers buzzing in the death drip of my right hand.
then, before i could overthink it any more, i quickly raised the clippers and shaved off the first swath of my cherished hair.
it was, undoubtedly, one of the most terrifying things i had ever done.
where did this insanity begin? what is the origin story and how did i get to where i am today, irked and wrestling with the grow out from a buzz cut?
i'll begin with ‘beauty’.
since before i can remember, i have wanted to be beautiful.
we all do, don't we? little girls tend to display the purest and most obvious desire to be beautiful as they favor dresses with twirly skirts, long for anything and everything sparkly, and delight in being the absolute center of attention.
why do we desire to be beautiful so much?
i don't know. the best answer i can come up with is that we, as humans designed after a God who clearly loves beauty (as evidenced by all of creation), love beauty. we relish it and seek it out; we hike dreadful distances to experience it, we spend time trying to create it with art and craftsmanship, we pay exorbitant amounts for homes with a view…
we love beauty. we know that it's easy to love beauty.
and we, more than anything else, desperately desire to be loved. we desire to be desirable.
and from here, we began to worship this idea of beauty, long for it, strive for it, constantly feeling like we will never attain it.
apart from God, immersed in our flesh and sin nature and self-focused tendencies and pride, the concept of beauty has become remarkably twisted and depraved.
once, in a fit of frustration, i wrote a long, dramatically poetic piece called ‘the thing about beauty’. in it, i describe the world’s concept of beauty as a ‘plastic construct of an ideal.’ perhaps i am overly pleased with myself, but i think that sums it up pretty well. it is plastic, hollow, weak and changeable, it is of our own faulty construction, a product of our pride and natural ache for acceptance, and it is an ideal we will never reach.
does that stop our own christian culture from subtly (and, i have no doubt, often unwittingly) tweaking the human-born idea of ‘beauty’ to fit our own agendas?
‘fraid not.
the church touts its own versions of what it means to be beautiful. sometimes it aligns with scripture (or merely pretends to), sometimes it goes off on its own tangent. ideas of ‘modesty’ are perhaps taken to an extreme, or the ‘rule’ that God will only receive your worship and bless your prayers if you dress up for Him on sundays… perhaps it is quite the opposite - one must humble themselves as much as possible to be considered a good christian, and avoid that ‘heathen temple’, the mall.
perhaps it is *i* who has gone off on a tangent now, but i feel it’s important to look questioningly at our own personal idea of what beauty is and asses it. are our beliefs based on what the Creator of true beauty has to say, or on what we’ve always known and generally accepted?
and how do those beliefs impact us, especially in our relationship with our Creator?
here i will return to my own story, my own tumultuous relationship with ‘beauty’.
when thinking about external beauty there are many facets to consider and a multitude of insecurities to be had, but for myself, beauty has been largely tied up in hair.
i’ve loved hair and hair styling for a long time. i began with tutorials on youtube at approximately age 12, subjecting my hair and that of my poor mom and resistant sister to many an experiment. my family is now entirely used to me coming out of my room with straws entwined in my hair, or paper towels, or socks, or whatever strange material or object i’ve decided might make a good overnight ‘curler’. they are no longer fazed when i emerge from the bathroom looking like orphan annie’s less-fortunate cousin or like anne Hathaway in princess diaries before she gets the makeover… i loved the idea of playing with hair so much i decided to make it my career.
you could say hair is pretty important to me.
so it’s safe to assume that going into dts, i had no intention of cutting my hair, much less shaving it all off.
but i had a problem.
and if i’m honest with myself, this was strikingly apparent before i even left for dts - i struggled with crippling fear of man.
a quick google search resulted in this definition for ‘fear of man’: “being consumed with an inordinate desire to please others.” [cornerstone church] this short blurb sums it up tidily enough - i was enslaved to other people’s opinions, their approval, and desperately afraid of their judgement.
i deeply desired to be open to change and growth as i prepared to leave for my dts, but i also was incredibly fearful, whether i knew it or not. i wanted to fit in, i wanted to make friends, and i really, truly didn’t want to make a fool of myself.
fast-forward to ‘Holy Spirit week’, where i was forced to face this deeply-rooted fear head-on. my friend skye, seemingly out of nowhere, began asking me very uncomfortable questions: ‘would you let the Holy Spirit manifest in you however He wanted to?’ ‘would you do anything if the Holy Spirit asked you to?’ ‘are you totally surrendered to the Holy Spirit?’
my response was always a very hesitant ‘i don’t know, maybe?’ she continuously pestered me with the same basic question: ‘are you going to be ruled by fear of man, or fear of the lord?’ (refer to this post for more about what i learned concerning fear of the lord)
i was about to decide that question in a very significant way.
we were in class, during a prayer time, and i was feeling what i like to call a Holy Spirit hot flash. you know, where you start to feel really uncomfortably warm from the inside out, like a burning flush creeping up your neck as you attempt to avoid the feeling that the Holy Spiri is trying to talk to you and you know you’re not gonna like it.
i felt prompted to ask skye (the same friend who had been bugging me about my little fear of man problem) to pray for me about that very thing. that’s not so terrible, i thought. so i asked her. and she began to pray for me. and then i was hit by a freight train.
i’m asking you to shave your head.
‘nooooooo, haha, no, no, no, nope! absolutely not. no thank you, not for me, nuh-huh.’
that was my immediate internal response, which quickly turned external when skye asked me what God was speaking.
‘it’s too much, it’s too much!’ i remember squawking over and over as skye, no doubt bewildered and perhaps slightly annoyed, repeatedly encouraged me to just tell her what i was talking about. (and i’m pretty sure the rest of the class was hoping i would quit laughing like a crazy person and just deal with whatever i was blathering on about)
i struggled. oh, you can’t imagine how i struggled. the consequences of such drastic action played over and over again in my head: ‘what will everyone think about me? all the people at home will judge me! and even if the people here don’t think i’m crazy, they might think i’m attention-seeking! the guy who i think is cute won’t ever look me in the eye again! i’ll be so ugly!’ and on and on.
the thing that finally broke me down and turned the tide of my wild objections? one simple question.
‘am i worthy of this?’
God knew. He wasn’t asking me to do this so He could get an ego boost. He knew that i was in a rotting prison to which He held the keys. i had been asking for them and He was trying to give them to me and i was pushing Him away… He knew the condition of my heart. He knew my desire was to please Him more than anything but i was so conflicted and confused. so He gently reminded me that He is worthy.
the beginning and end of everything.
He is God, He is good, and He is so completely worthy.
my doubts and resistance crumbled under the weight of the only answer i could ever give:
‘of course you are worthy.’
and so i stopped whining and told skye the truth. she was shocked for about 2.7 seconds before she smiled and said that she’d do it with me.
we were friends before, but we became sisters the day we stepped into the terrifying unknown of what was, for us, an ultimate act of surrender.
we got up and explained to the class what we were doing. we ran out of the room before our resolve could wane and we scrambled for the clippers and cape.
we did it. i did it. she did it. we laid down our idols, our crowns, and we accepted the gift offered in exchange - freedom.
now, let me be very clear - i don’t believe that God meant ‘shave your head or i won't give you freedom’. not even close. God was offering us freedom the whole time and we had something getting in the way. so He made it simpler - just shave it off and throw it away.
if the act itself was difficult and a bit gut wrenching, the aftermath was a rollercoaster of death. but actually, a good kind of death. my fear of man began to die that day.
and so did my idea of beauty.
i hated looking at myself in the mirror. i would forget that i had basically no hair. in my mind, i externally looked the same, except i didn’t. people were overly kind and encouraging and insisted that i rocked it, but i pretty much hated how i looked. did i regret it? not in the slightest bit. did i throw up a little when i passed my reflection? you bet.
and yet, i felt a change moving deep. the tectonic plates of my identity were shifting drastically and the aftermath was groundbreaking. my confidence began to realize in an entirely new way.. most of the time i wasn’t thinking about how i looked, and when i did, i didn’t feel conventionally beautiful. but eventually, i found i genuinely didn’t care. i wanted to be pretty but ultimately realized that almost everything mattered more than that. i slowly realized that my hair wasn’t what God looked at to determine my beauty, and my hair certainly didn’t limit or increase His ability to love me. i recognized that what mattered about me didn’t include my hair, my face, my height and weight, sense of style (ha! thank goodness!), etc.
maybe i’m not pretty, and maybe that’s okay.
my identity is no longer attached to my appearance. and oh, what glorious freedom that is. my surrender is brilliantly beautiful in the eyes of my precious Savior, and that is more than enough for me.
[let me be clear - i believe that we are commanded to be good stewards of our bodies, and it isn’t that God ‘doesn’t care’ about what we look like. i simply believe that He doesn’t view our external appearance the same way the world does. what is significant and necessary to us, in our human pride, is worthless before the King of Kings. He is crystal clear on this point - our hearts are His primary concern.]
now, i’m guessing you’re nodding along in agreement and perhaps even chuckling at how obvious these ideas may seem. i mean, every believer knows this, emma. i get it, it seems terribly basic and not all that earth-shattering.
the thing is, there is an astonishing chasm between agreeing with a statement and the kind of belief that changes reality. one can agree that there is a God, but without the belief that causes us to live as if it is true, there is no point in such an agreement.
if you really believe that our ideas of physical beauty are not significant in the sight of God, then what’s keeping you from also shaving your head? or giving up makeup? or scaling back your 37-step skincare routine? or fasting a little from your shopping addiction? (do not think for a moment that i’m judging here - i merely speak from experience.)
our insecurities have a tighter hold on us than we can imagine.
one day about four months after i shaved my head (near the end of dts), i was looking back on pictures from my first day at the ywam base, the day before dts started (a time when the idea of shaving my head couldn't have been further from my mind.) i scrolled to a picture of me sitting at a table of my fellow students, my newfound friends, and suddenly i was hit by something like a flashback. all the emotions i had been feeling that day came rushing back to me. it was as if i was there, experiencing all those thoughts and feelings again for the first time.
and i was shocked when i realized how deeply insecure i had been feeling in that moment.
especially about my hair.
i think God gave me a glimpse of how much i had changed in those six months. it was almost overwhelming to consider how drastically i had changed, not physically, but in the deepest depths of my heart.
i will never be the same.
have i been eternally cured of all my insecurities? ha! not even close. i still struggle with my pride and self-worth and believe me, growing out the buzz cut is severely testing my patience. (‘bed head’ is a whole new beast when you’re rocking a pixie)
but i get it now.
there will be days where i am not looking fabulous. and it doesn’t matter.
you are more than your most prized physical attribute, my friend.
consider the repercussions of what it could mean to lose what you feel makes you beautiful. now, would you voluntarily give that up?
we don’t like to consider that God might ask us to lay down our crowns before Him. we don’t like the notion that He would actually call us to this place of heart-rending surrender. He wouldn’t do that, right? i mean, that would just be mean.
if you believe that God would ever speak or act towards you without perfect love, then you do not understand His character. not only is He the omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent Lord and Creator of the universe, He is Love. being both of these things means that He is the perfect Father. He knows all of everything and He loves you so completely, and therefore everything He asks of you is loving and it is best. is God interested in His glory? yes. and the awesome thing is that what brings Him glory is also what benefits us most.
i’m not saying you should shave your head. but what is the thing that God might be asking you to surrender? what roadblock or stronghold or idol might be keeping you from walking in freedom and intimacy?
and are you willing to give it up?
would you be willing to ‘not be pretty’ in order to understand what supernatural beauty looks like?
are you willing to take that terrifying step across the line you’ve always said you would not cross, if it meant that your Lord and Savior might be exalted?
what do you believe?
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