Lice.
It was all I knew at college.
You say?
Yeah. Lice.
Monsters Outside of Me.
Monsters University.
That was my identity.
Every weekend we would hit the church buses and head to
different areas off Chicago, visiting kids and their families and taking them
on the church bus the next day for a wonderful day of games, Sunday School, and
long rides back into Chi-town. The trip from Chicago to Hammond was not always
easy, but we did it for the love of the people who rode on the bus.
However, lice was a problem.
Not always. We had many wonderful families that would invite
us into their homes and share a meal with us, let us watch some TV and chat, or
just enjoy the company of each other.
Then there were other houses. Same atmosphere, but with a
few extra visitors. Houses infested with things that you could see on the heads
of the little ones who were always the most affectionate. BIG hugs. Laying
their heads on your shoulder. Nestling up against you on the rides to and from
church. Those hugs were precious, but the sudden feeling of impending doom that
would come over you when realizing that the head of hair was also infested with
creatures of pure terror was hard to ignore.
Sunday nights and Monday mornings were so often spent buying
lice shampoo (which we could find in the bookstore located next to our
textbooks.) Garbage bags were kept in the bottom drawers of our dressers and
many a time you could find us wrapping up our beddings for a few weeks, doing
some hot hot laundry, and burning our hairbrushes with the plan to finger comb
the next day until we could make it to Meijer for a brand new toy.
Ok, it wasn't this large.
I was overly paranoid about lice when I got out of college.
Why? Because I always had it. Lice have always loved my hair, so I knew what it was like to feel dirty all of the
time. Having lice doesn’t make you a dirty person, but you sure do feel like it
at the time.
My fondest “louse memory” was when my best friend Crystal
and I had just entered a Denny’s bathroom near my house whilst on holiday
(sometimes I like to sound British.) I had leaned over the counter to fix my
eyeliner when I heard that familiar gasp.
“Kendra. I don’t know how to tell you this.”
“WHAT?!?!”-----INSERT FEAR AND LOATHING
“I see something in your hair.”
The tears started to well. I was so tired of it. :sigh: “Just
check.”
Lo and behold, she did check. And lo and behold, I did have.
I used what little money I had for a kit, went home, and we sorrowfully bonded
as she lovingly pulled little clear eggs out of my hair for three hours.
We were a pair of grooming monkeys, I swear it to you.
The first several months out of college, I checked my hair
every Sunday night still. I had new bedding, I had new brushes, a lot of new
clothes, and even had my hair did.
But I still thought I carried what was once my biggest
burden, even when I had been pulled out of the atmosphere and new that I was “clean.”
I still do that to do this day….in more ways than one.
Some people call the acceptance of grace a “cheap grace.”
That God through His Son Jesus Christ was able to erase the sins of His
children from the past, present, and the future. This is not cheap grace. This
is unconditional love. This is true grace.
We refuse it so often.
We accept Christ, but we continue to check for the burden we
carried for so long. The things we’ve done, the thousand little things we
carried with us for so long, we think they’re still there even though we’ve
been “cleaned.” This is not a “free pass” for a life of cheap thrills but a
beautiful release into a life of service through understanding just that….grace.
He brought me up also out of an horrible pit, out of the miry clay, and set my feet upon a rock, and established my goings.
And he hath put a new song in my mouth, even praise unto our God: many shall see it, and fear, and shall trust in the Lord.
There is no point in carrying what has already been taken away.
