Sometimes the Lord has to walk you through the same things a million times for you to get it. Sometimes, you still don’t get it. Sometimes even when He has to hit you over the head with it, you STILL don’t get it. Sometimes He asks you to put dreads in your hair to find your true beauty. Sometimes He asks you to remove them again because you define yourself by the approval and respect that comes from your peers.
Sometimes that person is me.
I was so frustrated because my dreads were not locking like they should have. I mean really, how difficult should it be to get your hair to tangle and knot itself up? Usually we fight for it to stay smooth. But my hair was not working with me, and I found myself saying: “What if I have to take them out? What if I gave up? People really liked my dreads, everybody told me that I looked awesome, they said I could totally pull them off, I looked beautiful and free. What if people thought I was a pansy cause I couldn’t stick it out until the dreads locked? What if I don’t like my real hair, what if I want my dreads again?” That’s when God smacked me upside the head.
Those fears were the same reason that He asked me to get dreads in the first place. And now He was asking me to take them out.
As I was combing out my dreads with my fingers on the porch in the moonlight, God met me there. Even as I wanted to cry when I took out the hairstyle that I had grown to love, He told me it was ok to be sad. It was ok because he was taking away a part of me, a part I had grown to love… maybe a little too much. It was ok to be sad, as long as I realized that he was taking me into more beauty and more confidence in him. I also realized that he was willing to walk me through this process of stripping and rebuilding as many times as was necessary to bring me into true freedom in him.
After shampooing my hair at least 10 times (it was still not quite clean, but my arms were tired), I got out of the shower and got ready to face my reflection. What I saw took my breathe away. Simply wrapped in a towel, stringy wet hair falling around my face, no glasses, nothing fancy, I stood, and the first thought that passed through my mind was: “I am beautiful.” Not a statement of pride, but a realization, indeed a revelation, of the beauty that God made me to be. For I am made in his image. I look like God.
So often as women, our eyes are so focused on others and their beauty, worrying whether or not we measure up, that we can’t even see our own beauty that the Lord instilled in us. We are blinded, we cannot see true beauty. My friend Brittany said something wise: “If you cannot recognize the beauty within yourself, then you have no right calling it out in others.” If we cannot see that we are beautiful, then our image of others is distorted. We are beautiful, created in his image, made for his purposes.
So women of Christ, my sisters, you who have been blinded by the world to your own beauty, say this with me:
I LOOK LIKE GOD!
