Jesus the Hairdresser

My very good friend, Olivia, had this epiphany the other day and I think it's absolutely brilliant!  It's a good read and good revelation.  Enjoy:


"One of my favorite things about my relationship with God is how He speaks so profoundly to me through the ordinary, every day occurrences of life.  Today one such ordinary thing took place  - I paid a visit to my hairdresser Brian.  Brian is an all around great person and I love him for many reasons, not least of which is the fact he saved my hair.  At the recommendation of a friend, Brian came into my life a little over a year ago after a hair SNAFU.  I had, over the course of about a year, made several, poor, back-to-back color choices and I desperately needed a fix.  I remember sitting nervously in his chair, slightly embarrassed, as he stood silently over me, looking at and feeling my shoulder length locks, making an assessment of the damages from a variety of angles.  He finally stopped and frankly acknowledged mistakes had been made, but very graciously went on to tell me how it could be fixed.  I chose to trust him, and after several steps over several weeks, my hair was back to my original color and in better shape than it had been in a while.
 
Fast-forward fifteen months to today’s visit.  I’ve been sporting a rockin’ pixie cut for about 6 months and it was time for my monthly trim and color.  By now I trust Brian to the point I simply walk in, sit down, and let him do what he does best.  I can’t remember the last time I told him what I wanted.  After 15 months he knows me as a person and he knows hair, so I just sit back and let the creativity flow.  Not once have I been disappointed.  The two hours I spend in his chair every 4-6 weeks are something I very much look forward to.  Sometimes we talk, sometimes we don’t, often we laugh, once or twice I’ve cried, and every single time I walk out with the best haircut and color I’ve ever had, somehow without diminishing the brilliance of how it turned out the time before, and the time before that, and the time before – I think you get the idea.
 
When I sat down in his chair this morning, the very first thing he did was take all of my hair and spray it with product until it all stood straight up.  I’ve worn my pixie in a fashionable faux-hawk many times before, but this was not one of those times.  After lightening a number of the spiked up strands, he did an all over color which left me looking like I’d had my head dipped in crude oil, with no rhyme or reason to the way my hair was slicked down and plastered to my scalp.  I was not a pretty sight.  Thirty or so minutes later, as my head was in the bowl and Brian was washing the color product out, I had the following epiphany:  Jesus and Brian are a lot alike.  Don’t get me wrong, there’s only one Jesus.  And while I don’t know what beliefs Brian holds, that’s not my point either – what I’m saying is characteristics of Jesus can be displayed through any one of us and today that display was Brian.  Let me explain.
 
If you had taken snapshots at most any point during my appointment today and made a judgment about “good hair day/bad hair day” based on any single snapshot, "bad hair day" would most likely be your conclusion.  One minute my hair was standing on end, the next it was slicked down most unattractively to my skull.  But what makes Jesus such a great Savior and Brian such a great hairdresser is this: they can simultaneously participate in the most bizarre and even messy of processes without ever losing the vision of the end result.  And the end result is always an enhancement of the person and who they are, not an alternation from the original.  At this point, head in the rinsing bowl, I start asking myself questions: Do I trust Jesus with my life like I trust Brian with my hair?  When life is standing on end or weighed down with something I don’t understand, do I trust He knows what He’s doing?  Do I make judgments about or quickly write off people during the messy and bizarre processes of their life when, like Jesus I should be seeing the end product?  I know what I want those answers to be, but have to be honest and admit God has some work to do in my heart.
 
Now that I think about it, the similarities were there from the very beginning.  We all come to Jesus the same way I came to Brian: in self-inflicted trouble to which there is no self-executable solution.  We come in need.  And we sit sheepishly while the damages are assessed.  Like Brian was about my hair, Jesus is honest about the problem, but it’s soon overshadowed by the solution.  Never once did Brian say to me, “How could you do this?” or, “What were you thinking?” or, “Sorry this is just too messed up” or, “You got yourself into this, you’re going to have to get yourself out”.  The Jesus I’ve come to know operates the same; when I come to Him in a mess, He’s acknowledges my mistake, but in kindness and mercy and grace, completely free of shame and condemnation, He quickly goes to work on the solution.  He and I both know why I’m there and He knows there’s no help in rubbing my face in my blunders.  So once again today I asked myself the questions:  As a Christian, shouldn’t my response to people be that of Jesus?  When people manifest their mistakes and messes to me, how gracious and merciful is my response?  Do I spend more time making sure the person knows they’ve made a mistake, or do I put my arm around them and help them with a solution?  Am I unnecessarily shocked or disappointed when people fail, having forgotten that to God, breaking one part of the law equals breaking the whole thing, so no matter how different another person's mistakes look on the outside compared to mine, the reality before God’s standard is I’ve been guilty of the same thing and have no grounds to condemn?
 
Side note soapbox:  I know some of you might be thinking, “Well, Jesus wasn’t just Mr. Nice guy, He was tough, too!  You can’t forget about that!”  Are you sure?  Take a closer look at your Bible:  While on the earth, the only people Jesus was hard on were people who were hard on others or who charged people money in a place that should have been free, and in the end He died for and forgave even them.   It is unwise to change Jesus into the person we are to feel better about being so unlike Him.
 
To bring my original point full circle - Something I’ve heard a lot lately and that I truly believe for myself is this:  Jesus and religion aren’t the same thing and we ought not confuse them.  Jesus is a necessity but religion is worthless.  Those are true statements, but no matter how many pastors heroically proclaim it from the pulpit, or how many bumper stickers we put it on, the reality is, what does that really mean?  In the context of today it means this:  Jesus is a hairdresser and religion is a panel of judges at a hair pageant.  They both appear to care about or be involved in the same thing but the difference is this:  Anyone can come to a hairdresser whereas pageant judges select only a few.  The hairdresser spends intimate one-on-one time with individual people whereas pageant judges care only about a narrow standard by which the masses are judged from afar.  The hairdresser is there in the process, no matter what it looks like or how messy it is and sees it through to the end whereas pageant judges care only about the perfection of the end product and are quick to disqualify at the smallest imperfection.  People leave the hairdresser feeling like even in the multitude of people who go to their hairdresser, they’re the most important and beautiful person in the world without even trying whereas pageant contestants never feel good enough even after all the effort.
 
And so once again, a profound revelation borne from an ordinary occurrence comes down to this:  I don’t want to be in a hair contest, I just want to keep seeing Brian for my hair and I certainly don’t want religion, I just want my Jesus and to be more like Him to the people around me."
-Olivia Wolf

Direction Derived from Desperation

“When Elisha became sick with the illness of which he was to die, Joash the king of Israel came down to him and wept over him and said, “My father, my father, the chariots of Israel and its horsemen!” Elisha said to him, “Take a bow and arrows.” So he took a bow and arrows. Then he said to the king of Israel, “Put your hand on the bow.” And he put his hand on it, then Elisha laid his hands on the king’s hands. He said, “Open the window toward the east,” and he opened it.  Then Elisha said, “Shoot!” And he shot. And he said, “The LORD’S arrow of victory, even the arrow of victory over Aram; for you will defeat the Arameans at Aphek until you have destroyed them.”  Then he said, “Take the arrows,” and he took them. And he said to the king of Israel, “Strike the ground,” and he struck it three times and stopped. So the man of God was angry with him and said, “You should have struck five or six times, then you would have struck Aram until you would have destroyed it. But now you shall strike Aram only three times.”

2 Kings 13:14-19

I want to set up the scene a little.  Israel was being ruled by Jehu who had killed Jezebel and wiped it clean of any remnants of Baal.  He was a righteous king, but his son Jehoahaz was anything but.  He did what he wanted, even after the Lord saved Him in spite of his transgressions.  Then, his son, Joash (clearly this family had a thing for the letter J) continued in his father’s footsteps and as the Bible (2 Kings 13:11) says, “did what was evil in the sight of the Lord.”  Both Jehoahaz and Joash had neglected what their heritage was: righteousness.  Imagine, they are leading a nation dedicated to God while they themselves are conducting idol worship.  It’s hypocrisy at its finest.  Joash obviously knew who God was and about Him but he didn’t know God on a deeply intimate level.  In the end, Joash lost out on the victory because he didn’t know the who of God and therefore could not understand the what of God, even when it could have eradicated his enemy for good.

Arrow: “A missile having a straight thin shaft with a pointed head at one end and often flight-stabilizing vanes at the other, meant to be shot from a bow.”
(http://www.thefreedictionary.com/arrow)
Photo: (http://genericgrasslands.com/2011/08/25/the-many-arrows-of-zelda/)

That’s how the dictionary describes an arrow anyway, but any word under the lamp of the Bible can take on a whole different meaning.  An arrow, for example, can mean a direction, or an attack, but when the Lord highlights it to me, I know I need to dig deeper.  In the above mentioned story, the arrow was very symbolic and very important for King Joash, but the problem is, he didn’t know it.  He had very little regard for what was in his hand because he saw it as a thin shaft, a pointed head and flight vanes.

God is a God of moments.  The Bible is peppered with stories about people reaching out to God and God reaching out to people and in that moment, Heaven touches earth.  The same is true in this story.  Had Joash recognized his moment, had he been desperate to find it, reaching for God, he would have understood why Elisha was asking him to strike the arrows on the ground.  Elisha even reprimands him and gets angry at him for not recognizing the moment.  Why?  Because Joash didn’t do some stupid motion with some meaningless arrows?  No.  It was because he couldn’t follow through with the Lord’s command because he didn’t know God, and at that moment, his victory depended on it.  “You should have struck five or six times…”  God knew the number of times Israel would come up against Syria in battle and how many times it would take Joash to defeat their army before being rid of them forever, but Joash didn’t.  The act was emblematical, but without a download of supernatural knowledge that only comes by personal relationship, Joash was literally shooting in the dark.

I don’t believe that God does anything by accident.  It’s not an accident that the Lord chose arrows for Joash to strike the ground with.  They may seem like an arbitrary part of the account but if you look past the black and white of the story, you can see what God is saying here.  The other definition for arrow talks about direction.  Arrows are a symbol of direction and purpose.  It is not often that an archer releases an arrow without calculated precision.  God was showing Joash that these arrows were the “Lord’s arrow of victory,” or the Lord’s direction for victory.  He was showing Joash that His plans for Israel were for them to thrive, for them to return and have victory over their enemies.  Anyone in a position of desperation for their answer, knowing the meaning of the gesture, would have beat the arrows into the ground until Elisha would physically have to stop them.  A desperate person needs an answer, they need their victory from God.  A person at their end and therefore at the beginning of God would stop at nothing to get their answer, and so this exposed Joash’s heart.  He was not desperate for the answer, he was not fraught with concern for the nation of God…the heart of God.  He wanted to take care of himself.  He wanted to continue doing what he wanted and not be interrupted by Syria.  His heart was not for the people of God and therefore his heart was not for God.

This story is all well and good, but unless we let it hit home, it’s just another nice story, an entertaining anecdote.  What is your Syria?  Are you facing an enemy that is attacking what God has entrusted you with?  Have you grown so desperate for an answer that you will throw out your idols and take your arrows and beat them into the ground until God must give you an answer?  Or are you comfortable with the way things have always been and only run to God when your way of life is threatened?  It’s time to get desperate.  It’s time to clean house.  It’s time to go through and take inventory of what is taking the place of God in your life: hobbies, distractions, relationships.  It’s time to rid yourself of the things that exhalt themselves above God and get back to His heart, His people.  Open your eyes friends, Syria is on its way to attack the people which God has called you to protect.  Don’t take it lightly.  Be bold and strong and grip those arrows with all your might and let God know that you are desperate for His answer, you are desperate for His victory, you are desperate for His direction, but most of all you are desperate for Him.