The Chosen Few

Hi I'm back! We took Tim to Texas for orientation and it was 44 hours of fun road trip driving and a short but great visit to his new home in August. My month reprieve to heal from surgery is now over and all is well. I've started the "day before" steroids which will quell any allergic reaction to the chemo drugs and tomorrow is the big day starting at noon. Now that its here I'm even more anxious to get over this first treatment because not knowing how it will affect me is bothering me a bit.

Someone asked what I need to get done. Well, nothing major fortunately,  but I do need to deal with the hair thing. Yikes I am good at procrastination and denial. An amazing thing happened in my mind a few weeks ago because though I cannot sometimes remember the names of people I have known for 20 years, an obscure detail came to my mind about someone in the bible who was told to shave off their eyebrows. Come on, you know that verse! Well, I couldn't remember either, but a quick concordance search on blueletterbible.org brought me right to Leviticus 14:9.  Now we all know for sure that the bible is relevant right?

It was the leper who had experienced a healing who needed to be brought back into the camp, into the life of the community and into the tabernacle to worship shoulder to shoulder with others. Among other things, he was told to shave his head, beard, eyebrows, and wash all clothes and himself. In this case losing the hair was a part of getting clean.  What follows is an amazing part of the bible to me. The priest would then take the blood of a sacrificed bird and place it on the person's ear lobe, his right thumb, and his right toe in order to bring atonement, or forgiveness of all sin, purity, cleanness, a new beginning. It doesn't mean necessarily that the leper had been afflicted because of sin, but my resident bible scholar informed me that leprosy in the old testament is often used as a symbol of sin, and the directions from Moses himself gave these instructions for the atonement.

Can we think of anyone else bent on cleaning up our sin mess who may have had blood on his head near his ear, on his thumb dripping down from his wrist or hands, and again on his toes from his feet? Yet this ritual was done hundreds of years before He was even born.  God is so awesome.

So this elevates the loss of hair and eyebrows (and a beard if I had one) to quite a lofty place of significance. It challenged me to see the good in what looks like a real bummer. It's almost like being a reverse Nazarite.  Samson could not let a razor touch any part of his hair, touch anything from a grape or even be in proximity to a dead person or animal. This symbolized a period of being set apart for the Lord's use. Hmm, so if I reverse the hair growth to hair loss, then this is a symbol to remind me of what?

Did you know that hair is a virtual storehouse of information about you? Forensic scientists can use it to determine where a dead person has been living by the record of what water leaves in their hair and in which part of the strand. It shows what you have been consuming, putting in your blood stream, and your genetic code. It's really like a little history book of your life. I pulled out one from the back of my head just now and its 16 1/2 inches long, or almost 3 years growth at 6 inches per year. If I add on the inches cut off in hair cuts that brings it to roughly 24, which would make my head hair about 4 years old. Significance, symbol?  The recording of my life is starting over. The old is gone, there is a new beginning.

If the last four years had been glorious ones I might just frame it all and remember the good old days. Truthfully, though God has abundantly blessed me in the midst, this past season of life has not been something I would like to repeat.  There are some very significant things I am really happy to cut off and be done with. And that's the point. Being done with something means there can be new beginnings. I know our Father in heaven is generous with new beginnings because He sent His only Son to make them ENDLESSLY possible.

So if you have lost your hair permanently, let it remind you that He separated your sins as far as the east is from the west, they will never come back. If you went through a hair loss season as I am, if you are in one now, or if you know someone facing the shave, think of it as a new beginning, a celebration of God's abundant mercy, a symbol of the truth that God doesn't leave us the way we are but changes us from glory to glory.  Like the leper who is cleaned and brought back into the fellowship of the camp by the blood that is shed for him, we are too by the blood that was given for us.

So now I'm actually feeling a little sorry for the rest of you because only a chosen few have been given this reminder that His mercies are endlessly new when we look in the mirror every morning... that He wants us back in fellowship with Him, that He forgives, that the blood atones.