Locks of Love

I had somewhere between 11 and 15 inches of my hair cut off today. It was 15 inches when I measured it last night, but the actual braid of hair that was cut off was only 11 inches long. I am donating it to an organization called Locks of Love. They provide natural looking, custom fitted wigs for financially disadvantaged children who suffer from long term hair loss.

I don't want you to leave me a comment telling me how great I am for doing this.

Instead, I want to tell you a little bit about why I decided to spend over a year growing my hair out in order to make the donation.

I don't usually mention my children on this blog, but I'm going to make an exception today. Because becoming a mother affected me in ways that are too profound to even express in words. I literally became a different person after the birth of my first child.

I don't have time to give you all of the details of that process. But I want to describe a snapshot moment which birthed an incredible thing that had previously been in short supply in my heart: compassion.

One of my children was born prematurely and suffered some complications for the first six months of life. That child is perfectly healthy today, but for the first few years, we kept a very close eye on whether normal development seemed to be taking place.

There were several episodes that gave us cause to panic. One, in particular, is imprinted in my memory. My child began to make strange, twitching-like head motions. It was odd enough, and recurrent enough, that I couldn't ignore it. I did some online research about strange head twitching, and the most common diagnosis was something called Tourette's syndrome. It causes a person to make strange motions or utter strange words in an uncontrollable way.

I had seen some daytime T.V. shows featuring children with Tourette's. To be cruel and blunt, they seemed strange. One of them yelled out cuss words in the middle of perfectly normal sentences. Another would hit himself on the head out of nowhere. Still another made clucking sounds for no apparent reason.

But suddenly, I was faced with the possibility of being the mother of one of those strange-seeming, different-acting children.

My heart was torn open at the thought of watching my precious child navigate through childhood constantly marked out as the one who was different. The one who had something wrong. The strange one. The one nobody wanted to be friends with. The one that everyone laughed at and made fun of.

I cannot even begin to describe the overwhelming sensation of pain and anguish that those thoughts generated. I could hardly swallow. It became hard to breath. I didn't want to think about it, but I couldn't seem to think about anything else.

In that moment, I would have given anything to take the place of my child, and suffer the ridicule and ostracising of being abnormal. But, of course, it doesn't work that way. Mother's can't take the place of their children.

In my case, my child did not end up having the condition that I so dreaded. My child is normal. But I have never forgotten the horror of those days, when the future seemed so uncertain and ominous.

And I can't forget that there are thousands upon thousands of mothers for whom my passing dread is a daily reality. This world is full of children who are born different. The multitude of possible health complications is mind numbing when you think about it. It is a miracle that even one child is born without health problems.

Growing out my hair in order to give some anonymous little girl somewhere a pretty wig is so minuscule an act that it should hardly register on the radar screen of kindness. I don't feel like I did anything spectacular. But I hope that somewhere, there is a mother whose child doesn't have to feel quite so different.

And in a bigger way, I hope that my own children will grow up feeling the compassion that I seemed to miss out on in my own development. I was not the nicest girl in the world when I was younger. I used people. I discarded friends if they didn't have anything to offer me anymore. A lot of that was plain old immaturity. But still, I think a big part of it was the fact that I lacked compassion for other people, and their pain.

I have no doubt that God intended the trauma of my experience to do exactly what it did. Because compassion is something that I have seen over and over again as I have read through the gospels. There are many references to Jesus feeling compassion for individuals, and even for whole groups of people.

Luke 7:13

"When the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her and said to her, "Do not weep.""

Mark 6:34

"And Jesus, when He came out, saw a great multitude and was moved with compassion for them, because they were like sheep not having a shepherd. So He began to teach them many things."

In Psalm 145, God is described as "gracious and full of compassion." There are plenty of other verses that ascribe compassion as one of the attributes of God.

And in the process of sanctification, God molds us more and more into His own image. For me, the most effective means of sanctification have been hard blows from a painful hammer. But the end result is beautiful. I wouldn't trade the ability to feel compassion for any kind of smooth and worry-free life. I would much rather see the world through lenses that help me to see things just a little bit more like the way God sees them.

And when God sees his children, He is moved with compassion for us. If my child had never suffered temporary complications, I wouldn't be able to understand that at all.

I can't say that I have a heart that is perfectly able to feel true compassion all the time. But I'm a lot better at it than I used to be.