Humbled by Hair

Picture via Lulus.com

Yesterday I did one of those things… Jane things. Sigh… I did a really good number on getting my hair brush stuck in my own hair.

I had been to a salon a few weeks back and the stylist was Korean. She did this amazing twist the brush thing that created these cute curls. Well I was trying the method, same brush, disastrous results, no curls. It had looked so easy when she did it. That is when I figured the round brush would work better. Bad assumption!

The round brush simply went around and then with the wonderful wrist and brush twist method it simply jammed in and would not budge. Great!

I stood there looking at myself in the mirror with this brush sticking off the top of my head. I wiggled it left and right (Reminds me of the rental car key thing). Nothing happened, the brush would not move. I let out a huge sigh as I pictured myself getting into the car like that, or getting the scissors to cut the whole clump off.

I got very stubborn at this point and similar to shaking the steering wheel in the rental car a couple weeks back, I tried to wiggle the brush out, that hurt but it did not budge.

Now when you live alone sometimes you just have to get creative! Not much creativity was coming. I flatly refused to cut off the chunk of hair because I could then picture 1” spike things sticking out on top of my head. That was worse.

I chose to take a few strands of hair at a time and pull them out of the brush, just a couple hairs and gently unwind them a bit at a time, it took a while but eventually they all came out. Sheez that was close! I pictured walking into Bible study and being in the hot seat while someone tried figured out what to do. Try to live that one down.

I mean we have all seen those “cool" girls with chop sticks delicately woven into a bun or even a useful pencil. But no nothing cool, elegant or useful with the “brush” look was happening in my world. If I had to define the look with one word it would have been

“stupid”, it looked utterly stupid.

The kind of prayers used at a time like this are called, “help prayers”. Basically it is where your eyes roll upward as your mouth shouts “help Please” at the ceiling or sky. God knows you are in trouble He is simply waiting for you to ask for help.

I literally did that in the afternoon. I was playing with my granddaughter who was trying to put socks on. Being two can have it’s struggles. She wanted to put them on herself but only kept getting her big toe in. We offered to help, “no” she did not want it, so we waited. She finally threw the sock in frustration and said , “help please” and I was able to show her how to stretch the sock out to go over her foot. But she needed to ask before we could help.

We all do this in many areas of our life, we try it ourselves and make a mess of things or it does not work out. It can be anything really, our hair, our jobs, our families, our money issues, our health, even socks.....we like to live our life our way. We miss the all important step of finding out if we should be doing it this way, of prayer and asking for guidance, until it is messy enough, complicated enough or even painful enough and then we finally say “help please.” God is brilliant at waiting for us to try every angle out for ourselves. But ultimately there comes a time where “help please” is the only thing that can help.

In my case I wondered how much of a chuckle He got over me being humbled by hair.