Messy Hair, Messy Hearts.

My eldest daughter has this thing with her hair.  Starting when she was very small, she screams and screams when you comb her hair.  The doctor told us it was some sort of sensory thing and that she’d grow out of it eventually.  But it is also the product of a child who never sits still and is oblivious to her surroundings.  Since she can’t possibly be still when she is awake who would think for a moment that she could be still in her sleep.  She wakes up every day with a birds’ nest on the back of her head.  Like 10 tiny birds were in her bed making that mess all night. She is also so busy at meals talking and gesturing wildly with her hands that just this morning I found traces (gobs) of icing and syrup in her hair.  All of this lines up for the perfect storm of unpleasant mornings of combing this sweet girl’s hair.  

Like any mother, I first tackled this issue by . . . that’s right, I chopped it all off.  It took her about two years to grow any hair in the first place so I figured a few more months of people mistaking her for a boy was no big deal.  But after a while I realized, something had to change.  She was getting older and her hair was pretty when it was longer, and she wanted it to be long.  That’s when I realized that this was an opportunity to teach her something that many adults still don’t get.  

In life, we should expect to experience physical pain.  God did not intend for this to be the case for us, but due to the fall, it simply is. Pain will come and go and is simply a part of our life here on earth.  Someday, my little girl will fall and skin her knee.  Someday, she may break her arm, have a headache, birth a child, or she may experience chronic pain.  

We all experience pain. The key is that we have a choice about how we walk through it.  You can sit there and scream while someone combs your hair, complaining about how much it hurts and making everyone around you miserable as well.  Or, you can honor God and others by taking a deep breath and choosing to be tough.  Choosing to be joyful even through suffering.  Choosing not to focus on and give too much energy and attention to this negative thing in your life.  Choosing to think of something else when the pain feels like too much.  With my daughter we often talk of her favorite places and imagine that we are there when the pain is too much for her.  Or we sing a hymn or recite a memory verse.  We might talk about what we’re going to do that day or what she’s excited about for the week.  Holding a hand or a favorite stuffy can bring comfort as well.  There are many things that we can do when we are in pain to help us cope with that pain, but screaming and complaining simply bring no comfort. 

When we are in this place where we just want to scream and complain we have what I referred to in the title as a “messy heart.”  We are frustrated and angry that we are in pain, we don’t think we deserve what is happening to us.  We want someone just to make it stop, to make it go away.  That is where we have the choice.  The choice to indulge that inner toddler within and pout and complain and focus on ourselves and our issues.  We can be negative and inwardly focused—a plague of the heart.  Or we can stop, check our hearts, and bear our pain in a way that honors God and those around us.  We can pray for healing.  But we can also accept that the Lord may have chosen this particular challenge for us and that He is still good and that His ways are best.  We can walk through our pain with joy.  I love how Rodney Crowell said it when he said “Pain comes like the weather, but joy is a choice.”  Pain will come and go throughout our lives and be difficult to predict.  But joy, it’s a choice.

I wrote the first part of this article when my daughter was young, about 3-years-old.  She is now a much tougher, yet still dramatic, 7-year-old.   There are only occasionally tears when we brush her hair now.  She has since skinned a knee many times.  She did in fact, break her arm . . . twice. And while she still reacts more strongly to pain than some of my other children, she also knows that she is capable of coping with it.  That she can honor God by being tough and not complaining.  That she can find something positive in the situation and not focus on the negative.  When we overly focus on pain, it really only makes us feel it that much more.  We continue to try to teach her this and grow her in this area; but be encouraged that I was able to look back at this article this morning, written so long ago, and laugh.  I’m thankful for how far she has come and for the work that God continues to do in her heart.