Heaven is still to come, more beautiful than anything we have yet seen.

The color of my hair is meaningless.

And yet I think about it.  The way an artist looks at a blank canvas and thinks.

I am my own canvas.

What I end up putting on my own canvas is sometimes something of which you might approve,

and other times something of which you would disapprove,

and usually there is an element of both.

Those who know they will never have perfect hair learn to become non perfectionists about hair,  in the "I embrace messy styles and beachy styles" way that rolls off of the tongue and makes us seem like we have always done it deliberately.  But no.  We have learned to be this way.

I am not a perfectionist about hair color.  

Six months ago, I colored it a darkish almost blackish with a cherry colored sheen.  The cherry color was surprising.  Overall, my hair looked somewhat purplish, mulberryish.  It brought out my green eyes, or so I told myself, and you, if you had been listening to me talk to you about myself just then.

But that's just the thing: I have a feeling that you would not necessarily care to hear me talk about myself as often as Social Media would have me believe.  

     Facebook has made us self obsessed.  Self worshiping.  Image protecting.  I never cared half so much about what I looked like in the frozen moment of pictures as much as I did circa 2008, when I joined the Facebookers of the world.  I am not here to bash Facebook; I like being able to keep up with friends and school buddies I haven't spoken to in years.  I like seeing their families and such.  It's just that I know it's not real life, real connections like sitting down with someone face to face and actually talking and hearing her voice.  I love a person so much better once I hear her actual voice.  Do you know what I mean?  I see her face, her expressions not unlined, and I love her more for it.  

I want to get back to that.

I want to be the change I want to see.  

But it's hard to hold myself to a standard.  

It's much easier to hold everyone else to that standard, and get irritated when they do not live up to the standard, the standard which I have just made up in my own mind, but to which I have not been living.  Or actually I have been living it, I have been living it for exactly 2 hours.  Do you know how easy it is to NOT post a selfie for two hours?  SO so easy.  So why can't you do it, too.  All of you, any of you.  Because I judge you, even though I don't actually care.  Do you know what I mean?  It's just that I don't want to have to feel insecure myself anymore, because your selfie is really all about me and how I feel about myself, because "loving myself" becomes "worshipping myself" if I let it. My husband brought this up to me a few weeks ago, and I have not been able to get it out of my mind.  He was not calling ME a self worshiper, per se, he was saying that Social Media sites are all about ALL OF US becoming self worshipers, and I wanted to argue with him, I REALLY DID, BUT.  I knew deep inside that he was right.  And it stopped me in my mental tracks.  And all of the words went away.

And I had to lay my face on the ground and repent and cry and weep before the Lord, not that He required me to prostrate and weep, but I needed to in my own way, to keep me from the distractions of NOT doing that, and this is when I got up determined to be better, to be less.

I think it was easy the way that post penance making is always easy.  For two watery eyed broken hearted days.

After that it felt more like deliberate sacrifice.  

Deliberate sacrifice feels like you are laid out on an altar, dying.

Slowly and painfully.

Day after day.

But you're actually still alive, so you can get up off of that thing, if you choose.

It's just that by that time, you have learned so much already that to get up doesn't FEEL right.  So the next question becomes, "How do I stay on this altar, yet continue to walk about and live my physical life?"

I don't know the answer.  Just that I am working it out every day, me and Jesus, me trying to hear Him  so clearly, and sometimes I think I even get it right, a little bit.

About the hair, anyway,  I know this:

That it's not really about the hair.

But we all know that about ourselves, don't we?

Because truth be told, I have never liked my hair, I have always felt it was my one feature that was a handicap, and that if I had only been born with better hair, the kinds of hair that most of the people around me were born with, then so many more doors of opportunity would have been opened up for me my entire life. 

There are people who live in the mud, at least I sure think there are.  I think so because I have seen pictures of them on the Internet and on the news and my entire life.  And yet I worry about my hair.  

I'm 38.  And a half.  Which is old enough to forget my age,  which I have discovered was a neatish trick to turning post 30.  ("How old are you?  I don't know.  Let me do the math.  Oh yeah, 38 and a half.")  I have spent 38 and a half years worrying about my hair.

And God is so good.  Because I believe that He actually cares about this.  He cares that I care and that I am in a process which He is so graciously taking me through.  He is a good Father.  A parent cares about His daughter's hair.  I know because I have daughters and trust me.   And yet.

It doesn't mean He stops the process and just gives me exactly what I want and when.

It means He walks me through it.

And over time, softens the edges of my (pride?) (ego?) (hurt?) 

until I can let go, just a teensy bit more this day than yesterday, and relax already.

Do you know how freeing it is to let go of caring about something and realize that NO ONE ELSE CARED ABOUT IT ALL ALONG??  Or maybe they did, but only in the way that it made THEM feel, because THEY were in their OWN process, and it wasn't really about ME at all, ever,  and so the process goes,  and continues, world without end, amen.

I wrote all of that to say that I finally lightened my hair color.

It's been four weeks now.  

I look at it every day and think to myself that it's too light.

And that I don't even care that it's too light.  I don't mind it being too light for a few weeks.  In fact, I sort of even rejoice over it.  

Victory of Vanity.

And also because I know that when I change it, which will be just slightly to a darker color, just slightly,

It will look THAT MUCH BETTER for having been THIS MUCH WORSE for all of this time.

Be whatever hair color you want.

I'm learning that my best hair color is actually 

basic brown.

The color I was born with, 

which is what it would be, probably, still, if I could see it under all of the layers of colors and highlights and colors I have put it through, in my attempts to change myself from the outside, in.

Outter inner beauty and some such.

To God be the Glory.

And I really mean that.

-XOXO,