My Burnished Locks

Today I got highlights in my hair :) But it was a conservative attempt and I can hardly see the highlights myself! My hairdresser Sam has been egging me on for a few months now to "do something different". I think I curb his creative spirit. I used to have the same effect on my previous hairdresser, Alison, who would try to do different things like blowing my curls out straight and once she persuaded me to try what she called "a relaxant treatment" but she never had much success with my stubborn curls :)

Sam never even tried the route of making my curly hair straight. But after a year of cutting my hair, early this year he started his gentle persuasion - first to try a different hair colour, then to cut my hair even shorter and recently after R got her hair done, to put highlights in. But he hasn't had any success with me because I was terrified I would look really strange. I mean there are only so many things you can do when you are 50, you know ....

Today, he tried a more subtle psychological tack. He talked about how nice R's hair was, then he talked about how we had the same type of hair, then he praised me for being such a kind mother to encourage my girls to do their hair and then casually suggested maybe I should try it too and how he would only do a little bit, only at 10 places on my head and lo and behold, I was soon making agreeing noises... Sam is gooood :) Luckily, none of the other men in my life know how to do this.

So, the end of the story is, yes I got highlights, yes, I like it and no, I don't think anyone would notice. Hahahaha... Sam's parting words were -"So nice... Next time we will increase a leeeeetle bit, ok?"

A Passage that Spoke to me

"Christianity tells people to repent and promises them forgiveness. It therefore has nothing (as far as I know) to say to people who do not know they have done anything to repent of and who do not feel that they need any forgiveness.

It is after you have realized that there is a real Moral Law, and a Power behind the law, and that you have broken that law and put yourself wrong with that Power - it is after all this, and not a moment sooner, that Christianity begins to talk. When you know you are sick, you will listen to the doctor. When you have realized that our position is nearly desperate you will begin to understand what the Christians are talking about. They offer an explanation of how we got into our present state of both hating goodness and loving it. They offer an explanation of how God can be this impersonal mind at the back of the Moral Law and yet also a Person. They tell you how the demands of this law, which you and I cannot meet, have been met on our behalf, how God Himself becomes a man to save man from the disapproval of God....

I quite agree that the Christian religion is, in the long run, a thing of unspeakable comfort. But it does not begin in comfort; it begins in the dismay I have been describing, and it is no use at all trying to go on to that comfort without first going through that dismay. In religion, as in war and everything else, comfort is the one thing you cannot get by looking for it. If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end: if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth - only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin with and, in the end, despair."

~C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (1943)