Blind Love and Blessings: Mirror, Mirror . . .

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Sometime during the week after my hair came out in the shower I found myself sitting in front of a mirror behind a curtain in a specialty wig shop. Thanks to my husband’s affiliation with the AMERICAN CANCER SOCIETY someone was able to provide us with contact information to a discreet professional who was part of the program known as “Look Good, Feel Better.”

As I looked at myself in that mirror I found it hard to see anything through my tears. Actually, I was sobbing uncontrollably. I think that day was the worst day of the whole alopecia ordeal for me. First I was crying because of the grief that “it has come to this” and I was crying because I was ashamed of my own selfishness. Unlike most of the other women who had sat in that chair I did not have cancer, so what right did I have to cry? (I have since learned that hair loss is one of the major traumas affecting cancer patients but I’ll discuss that in a future article.)

In those days I wore my hair long. Well, shoulder length, which was long enough to be pulled into a pony tail. It had served me well through the first 6 ½ years of suffering with this autoimmune system disorder but a pony tail could do nothing now to hide the large horse-shoe shaped spot on the crown of my head.

The woman who ran the shop was truly a professional: very compassionate and sympathetic. She helped me find a bob in a color similar to my natural shade and then she thinned it so that it wouldn’t look like I had suddenly developed a luxuriant mane! She told me I looked like I had just had my own hair cut and highlighted. I guess I did because when I got home that’s what my children thought had happened.

Shortly thereafter I did go see my hairdresser and have my real hair cut and colored so that I could go back and forth between either wearing one of several face-saver caps that I owned over my real hair or wearing the wig. This either-or arrangement worked well for many years. Whenever my own hair grew back in the bare spots I had it color-treated and no one was any the wiser. (Except for that one time I had a reaction to the chemicals and I came out of the process with fire engine red hair! No matter how much Lisa begged me to keep it that way I decided the whole punk rock look just wasn’t my style. It did provide one of the more light-hearted moments in the whole alopecia saga, however.)

One day several years later when going through a particularly horrible attack I saw my face in the mirror and thought, “How can my husband bear to even look at me? I don’t look anything like the woman he married!” There are probably very few women in America over 30 who look like they did at 18 (there are exceptions, some of which are in my own family) but the thought that this grotesque individual was the first thing my husband saw first thing every morning was enough to reduce me to tears again. In a realistic moment I realized that if I saw my most trusted girlfriends as they rolled out of bed sans make-up each morning I probably would not recognize them either and that was some comfort. Most of the women I know do whatever it takes to make the façade presentable before facing the public!

While I stood there at that mirror peering at my image I felt God speaking to me through scriptures that He brought to mind. “But we are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags; and we all do fade as a leaf; and our iniquities, like the wind, have taken us away.” (Isaiah 64:6) And again, “I will greatly rejoice in the LORD, my soul shall be joyful in my God; for he hath clothed me with the garments of salvation, he hath covered me with the robe of righteousness, as a bridegroom decketh himself with ornaments, and as a bride adorneth herself with her jewels.”  (Isaiah 61:10) I also thought about the Christian’s armor that Paul described in Ephesians 6. The point those scriptures make is that in its natural state my spiritual appearance is filthy, too, but once I was cleansed by the blood of Jesus Christ my appearance became beautiful and righteous before my God.

This made sense to me. The persons or Persons who know my condition(s) the best love me the most because they see me with my adornments and not in my wretchedness. My husband doesn’t think of me in terms of my natural appearance. He sees the woman he loves as the one that everyone else sees.

I know that when God looks at me He doesn’t see me for what I really am either. He sees me clothed in the righteousness of Jesus! The mirror of His word tells me that I was a vile and disgusting sinner before the transformation took place but once the washing cleansed me Jesus was able to present me to the Father. What an awesome thought!

Mirrors are still a very important part of my arsenal. I try to keep one handy in case I need to make a quick adjustment to my appearance. I find that I must also keep my spiritual mirror – my Bible – handy to point out any adjustments that need to be made there, too.

To my husband I’m his beloved. To my God I’m accepted in the beloved. (Ephesians 1:6) That’s what I try to see whenever I look at myself in the mirror.