On Surviving Baldness

^{2 Kings 2:23-24}

²³ And Elisha went up from thence unto Bethel: and as he was going up by the way, there came forth little children out of the city, and mocked him, and said unto him, Go up, thou bald head; go up, thou bald head.

²⁴ And he turned back, and looked on them, and cursed them in the name of the Lord. And there came forth two she bears out of the wood, and mauleth forty and two children of them.

I was about nineteen when the fate of my dirty blond hair became apparent. For the next five years or so, I washed my scalp’s contents down dorm room shower drains. Fortunately, every male in my family line in any direction usually surrenders his collection of brushes to the landfill by age thirty. I did not, then, travel through the dark valley alone.

One family legend holds that my great grandfather Mel sought the miracle cure for the emergence of his hairline. Between bridling horses and furrowing hard Nebraska dirt, a friend advised him to shave his head to the stubble and his thin hair would regrow fat on the land. He was a desperate farmhand in his early twenties, hoping to fetch a dame at the church picnic that year. I picture him—standing at the pump in the purple sunrise with a straight razor, balding himself by his reflection in a puddle. Alas, the advice was ill-given, and the crop returned to Melvin Hendricks more sparse than before—and stayed that way. I remember him in his eighties—which was the eighties—sporting a dozen dignified hairs gleaming with pomade. Yet he did find himself a dame despite his cosmetic handicap, and thus here I is.

“Yeah…but he has more hair than you” said a barber to me at some vanishing point in my twenties. I'd shown her a picture of one of the fiercely handsome guys in the catalog by the register asking for a similar do. I obviously took some umbrage at her remark, as it was a decade and a half ago, but I believe it was the last time I asked someone to style my hair. Soon there after, I became a devotee of the clippers and bid goodbye to the stylist for good.  No amount of styling and swooping and faith healing was gonna hide the truth.

“Hair loss is God’s way of telling me that I'm human,” said Bruce Willis when asked about his life as a baldness survivor. Perhaps a Hollywood prince married to a British super model needs to be told once in a while. This lower middle class Netflix addict with more hair on his shoulders than his head needs less reminders.

 This is, perhaps, one of the gifts of baldness. I knew that I had something about myself that would, say, cause me and to be the only one not carded at the bar or to be asked if I was the youth pastor when I went out with my college friends. Rogaine was still in its experimental stages, Hair Club for Men apparently transplanted armpit hair, and toupees seemed like the ultimate white flag. I'd already heard the cautionary tale of grandpa Mel, and so bald was going to have to be beautiful.

The reality of my sharpening widows peak was the first of the many harsher facts of becoming an adult. My youth would not be perpetual, I didn't marry my high school sweet heart, I couldn't afford my choice college, and the glittering fame of being a Christian rock star (hey I don't judge your teenage dreams!) was never to be mine. Acceptance, a much more important state than the heights of the contemporary Christian music charts, first blessed me through androgenic alopecia (google it).  

“Remember also your creator in the days of your youth” wrote the teacher in Ecclesiastes. Some people’s reminders of their createdness are much starker: social isolation, family dysfunction, war. My baldness, for all its age-quickening irritation, was small potatoes by comparison. Yet indications of life's fragility have started to appear: here mental illness in the family, there student loans with several zeroes, a sleepless night, a child rushed to the ER. Perhaps, through God’s knack for using every detail of our lives, I learned something from finally surrendering my comb and last tube of LA Looks: no matter how I styled and crimped, some things in life just are.

Again the scripture: “now we know in part” (St. Paul). In this time between the times, with its bad comb-overs and root canals and kidney infections, we are destined to be incomplete. Will I have hair in the resurrection? Will I be able to see 20/20 and do a six minute mile? More to the point, will it matter? Yes, right now some things just are, but the unspeakable hope is that they will not forever be. The injustice we feel here, even about something as trivial as loose follicles, is God-given. We long for a time when what is gold will stay and glimpses of joy will fill our vision—and so we should.

My kids try to brush my hair. After caressing their mother’s silken locks, they figure they'll try their hand at a vacant lot. They explode into the living room brandishing a brush from mom’s beauty arsenal.  Tiny hands pawing at my scalp, the music of their laughter—all reminders that they are the new and I am the old which is passing away. My daughter is adorned with reddish blond corn silk; my son with tough German brun from his mother’s side. May his scalp—and his spirit—be stronger than my own. The prayer of a bald parent.

Just because my personal holiness is so intense that part of my body is already awaiting glorification doesn't mean you have to covet. If so, may it only be a reminder that the new heavens and earth await and the imperfection of this world feels temporary because it is.  Cheers.

PS: Just don’t call me (or Elisha) “baldy”—that’s our word.