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