5-minute read
This week, I cut my own hair.
Desperate times call for desperate measures. Right?
At least that’s what I thought.
It’s not like it had been that long since I’d had a haircut… but the sides of my hair were bugging me and I thought, “I can do this.”
(I should note here that I’ve never had a good head of hair. It’s always looked like a pile of thistles… a collection of construction paper scraps…. a symphony of foreign punctuation… topped off by a bald spot in the shape of the Millennium Falcon.)
Why I thought a self-inflicted haircut would make things better is beyond me. (At least now it is. At the time it made all the sense in the world.)
I kept telling my wife, “I’m gonna cut my hair.”
And she kept saying, “Your hair looks fine! I actually like the way it looks! Don’t…!”
“But what about this here? I need to cut that and—“
“No! It’s fine! It looks good, honey! Don’t!"
Still, I persisted.
(You have to admire my tenacity. Well, actually, you don’t. And, further, you shouldn’t.)
So, last Wednesday—literally an hour before a 3 1/2 hour video call with customers—I decided to cut my own hair.
I took a pair of electric clippers and had at the sides.
Just a little trim here… then a little trim there.
Then, well… whoops. Gotta even that out… Hmm. That’s a little too even. Back to the other side and—
Well, I didn’t expect the clippers to do that. Yikes. Okay. I can do this. Do I go further back? I have to, right? Just to make things sort of… normal. Kind of. But…
Okay. Alright. Um… hmm. Hmmm.
Oops. Colossal, massive oops.
I looked at myself in the mirror. If I kept my head perfectly still and looked straight ahead it looked… kind of, sort of, okay.
But if I turned my head at all—even one degree!—suddenly, well, my folly was evident to all.
It was… a butchering.
Chunks missing.
A field of burr in one spot butted right up against a meadow of wisp.
It was… odd.
Imagine someone laid me down on my side and rode a three-inch-wide riding lawnmower up my sideburns, took a sharp turn over my ear, went another three inches, then turned down toward my neck.
I looked like an 80s soccer player… who fell asleep in a nest of underfed ferrets.
Throughout my entire call, I couldn’t do anything but stare… straight… ahead. Any turn to the left or the right would’ve destroyed my credibility. I might as well have been wearing a neck brace.
[Pause. Know that, eventually, this will all have some sort of meaningful-y, profound-ish point.]
That evening, I had no choice. I asked my wife to “even it out.” She refused. I pushed. She relented.
And she laughed the whole time.
She’d never cut hair so this was an experiment. In terror.
It ended up worse than before.
This time, my hair was a quarter inch short all over my head, except for the three inches on top of my head. (My polar ice cap.) That area was about two inches long.
And it stood straight up.
Some things I suddenly looked like:
Zippy the Pinhead
Queequeg, the noble savage harpooner in Moby Dick
A small, surviving grove of trees atop a mountain peak otherwise ransacked by beetle kill
A pineapple
Way worse.
I tried to “rock” this “sweet look” for a day.
No one was buying it.
So, yesterday morning, I fell to my last resort—cut it all off.
Now my head is covered in quarter-inch hair.
For many men, this is a fine, fine look.
It is not for me. (I’ve tried it before. It’s never worked.)
I have a very lumpy head.
It looks like a potato that was dropped down an escalator.
I have a long, pointed ledge on the back of my head reminiscent of Admiral Ackbar’s.
I now look like Vincent Van Gogh when he was trying to pass for a Buddhist monk to Paul Gauguin.
Or the third guy over from the aisle in any photo you’ve ever seen of NASA Mission Control during the 1960s Apollo missions.
There ya go. That’s where my head is at. Literally.
And why?
(No, I won’t blame a global health scare and its forced Great Clips closures.)
Because I didn’t listen to my wife.
She told me it looked fine.
She was happy with it.
She warned me that it would go south.
But I didn’t listen.
I stuck with what I thought.
So now… I’m stuck.
And I think we do this all the time with things far more important than our coiffures.
*****
One of the first things God says in the Bible is, “It’s not good for Man to be alone.” Yes, He was talking about Adam (the first Man), but I think it can be applied to all humans.
It’s not good for us to be alone.
God wants us living in community with one another.
And I don’t think that just means we share common interests, hobbies, and Netflix log-ins.
It means that we open ourselves up to other people—telling them our thoughts, feelings, hopes, desires, and struggles.
It also means we open ourselves to what other people have to say… about us.
That’s not a very American idea, is it? We’re very “I got this. I see myself just fine. You take care of yours and I’ll take care of mine” kind of people.
But that’s not really community.
That’s just people living lives in parallel.
God wants us listening to what other people have to say about us.
They see things we can’t see about us.
Why? Because we all have blindspots about certain areas of our lives… especially our character.
We just don’t see ourselves all that well.
And that’s where other people come in.
They can help us see what we can’t see.
And I think God made it that way.
A wise and remarkable person whose name I cannot currently remember once said, “There are some things God will never tell us personally. He will only tell us those things through other people.”
That may seem unfair, but it kind of makes sense, doesn’t it? If we all saw ourselves perfectly, we wouldn’t need to listen to other people. And this would keep us isolated and alone. (Far more than just six feet apart.)
What keeps us from listening to other people?
I hate to say it but.. it’s arrogance. And pride.
It’s that thing in us that says, “I know better.”
And pride’s a killer.
Pride keeps us from receiving the input we so desperately need.
Pride keeps us from hearing a corrective word… or even encouragement! (More on that in a moment.)
Pride keeps us from listening.
Proverbs 16:18, “Pride comes before destruction.”
So… what is it we need to hear? (Aside from, “Your hair looks fine.”)
*****
Bad stuff… and good stuff.
Well, actually, that’s probably an incorrect way of putting it because, well, it’s all good stuff.
Whenever someone tells us something that’s true about ourselves—something that we don’t know—that can end up being good. (Even if it stings a little.)
Proverbs 10:17, “Whoever heeds discipline shows the way to life.”
Whatever comes to us from others, if true, can be good.
But some of it can sting, right? (But it should be a good sting. Like the guy who sang “Roxanne.” Ha.)
That’s when someone says something about us that we may not like about ourselves.
It’s when someone says (in love! in love! in love!) we’re not as disciplined as we thought we were… or respectful… or kind… or thoughtful… or selfless… or present.
That can be hard to hear, but it’s good.
Proverbs 27:6, “Faithful are the wounds of a friend.”
But that’s not all we need to hear from other people.
We also need to hear encouragement and insights into what we’re actually good at.
You may doubt yourself, but your friend or spouse or mentor may differ. They may see you in a way you don’t.
That other person may tell you, in fact, you’re better at doing X, Y, or Z than you thought. Maybe you’re full of self-doubt but they see you differently.
In either case, it’s wise to listen.
Proverbs 12:15, “The way of a fool is right in his own eyes, but a wise man listens to advice.”
We need other people… to see what we can’t see on our own. So we can correct our view of ourselves and take action. (Or, in the case of my hair, not take action.)
*****
So, where are you at with this?
Are you hesitant—or flat out refusing—to listen to the people around you when they try to talk to you about you?
Does it feel “complicated” to hear from your spouse or close friend?
Is it just plain easier to listen to you when it comes to you?
I encourage you—and me—to stretch yourself. To ask the people you trust—the people closest to you who have a heart for God’s goodness in you and who truly, really love you—what they see in you that maybe you don’t.
(I’m not talking about them backing up the Correction Dump Truck and burying you in “Fix This”es. That’s no good.)
It’s about taking one or two things from them that you don’t see…
Some things that sting a bit… and some things that taste as sweet as candy straight from Grampa’s glove compartment.
And letting them affect you.
Why?
Because we need each other. And we need each other’s perspective.
Maybe we need a haircut and don’t know it.
And maybe we don’t.
Maybe we really, really don’t.