You may or may not know that a couple of weeks before I left to go on the Race, I chopped all of my hair off. It wasn’t that long to begin with, but I decided to cut it even shorter. There were many sensible reasons for doing this, however, my main reason for cutting my hair so short was because so many people who go on the Race end up getting lice. I thought, less hair, less of a chance of getting lice. Also, in the unfortunate event I did happen to get lice, it would be much easier to get rid of. I am what you might call a little OCD when it comes to personal hygiene, so even the idea of bugs crawling around and laying eggs on each individual piece of hair makes me want to completely shave my head. I’m not even normally an incredibly dramatic person. So, of course, the Lord thought it would be hilarious to put me in a situation where I had to confront my fear of lice.
We are living and working in the girls’ house of an orphanage, and they have been battling lice on and off for two years. So, naturally, one evening the house mom informed us that seven of the eight girls had lice and we had the happy job of picking it out of their hair. Vomit. But we had to do it, and we had to do it joyfully. Jesus is so hilarious.
We went out and bought lice combs, and each sat down with a girl to patiently pick the thousands of lice eggs out of their hair. Of course, I happened to get the squirmy 8-year-old with special needs who seemed completely unperturbed by her lice infestation, and who also thought it was funny to lay on me and rub her head all over my clothes. She also wanted to play with the scalding hot water that we were using to clean the lice off of our combs, which didn’t actually work very well on the eggs.
Eventually we did kill the lice and get it out of their hair (with gasoline… the house mom’s idea, not ours), though three of them still have the dead eggs in their hair… we should probably work on that. Once the eggs were dead, we literally had to go through with our finger nails and scrape the eggs off of each individual hair.
You might be wondering what this has to do with Jesus… well I will tell you. As I was fighting with this child to try and get the invasive creatures out of her hair, the Lord provided me with a metaphor. You see, lice is really quite a bit like Sin. It creeps in one little larvae at a time until it’s this full blown infestation that clings to every strand of our beings. And it’s contagious. It spills over into others, and we can catch it from other people- if our friends are living in Sin, it’s so much easier to justify.
But here’s the exciting part, because this is where Jesus comes in. Whether we have a few Sin eggs here and there, or our hearts are crawling with it, He’s not grossed out. He’s not afraid. He is willing to sit there with us, whether we are squirming and don’t even realize there’s a problem, or we are sitting patiently waiting for Him to do his work, or we are sobbing because we are so repulsed by the Sin infection of our hearts. He will go strand by strand until every last trace of it is gone.
He is so patient about it, too. I got antsy after four hours. Picking out Sin takes a lifetime, because we keep letting it in. It’s the nature of humans after the Fall. But he does it because he loves us. And it’s pretty cool because we were created to live without this Sin condition, this brokenness, this thing that keeps us apart from God. He wants a relationship with us so badly that he will sit there with us for as long as it takes and pull the Sin from our hearts one at a time if he has to.
Hebrews 12:1-2 Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us. Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.
