Like my son’s green Mohawk? I love it. Unfortunately Zach didn’t care for it (he said he wished it was red, not green) and so we had to wash it out.

It’s funny to watch my grandfather cringe when he sees Zach’s hair. It’s the same with my husband’s beard and my oldest son’s longer-than-a-military-crew hair cut. It just goes against everything in him to see something out of the ordinary.

It’s funny how the little things people differ in can get to us.

When that happens we have a choice: Do we embrace things that are different not necessarily better or worse, or do we condemn the different just because it’s different?

I’ve done both. But deep down inside me there’s a tsunami wanting to break free and wash away every mask and pretense this generation can place over me. Or maybe it’s that I put them over myself to fit into this generation.

This generation is about image. Eye-catching, appealing, drastic, latest, greatest, whatever shares fastest on social media that’s just what it’s about. Not my thing.

Also not my thing: long hair. I know, totally shocked you – but I have tried to multiple times to grow my hair out long to satisfy my family. I long for a short, easy, spiky hair-do with a pink strip on the side that’s easy to fix and manage. I know, its vain.

One day, tired of my should-length “long” hair, I was searching the internet for short hair styles. I minimized the link to go do something, and when I came back, I pulled it back up only to find my husband had changed the search to “long hair styles”. Ha!

Finally, I decided I’m doing this. I’m chopping it off. I tell my kids today we’re going to get my hair cut and they all cry out “No! Mom don’t cut it!” I still don’t know why they care so much about my hair, but they do!

They said “Are you going to get a pink stripe?” I said, “I may not have enough hair left to get a stripe!” So we’re at my friend’s hair salon (laundry room of her house) and my kids are constantly peeking in through the windows trying to catch a glimpse of how short my hair is. It’s really not that short, but I did get a green stripe! I love my hair short, but sometimes it’s like breaking the mold in my family.

To break the mold means facing the voices inside that scream, “What will Sally think of your haircut? You know she likes it better long. What does short hair say about you?”

To me, it says, I’m fumbling through life and trying to follow Jesus. Along with the fact that I don’t like to mess with frizzy hair!

Jesus didn’t ask people to cut their hair a certain way or have their life together before they could follow him. He reserved his sharpest words for the “religious leaders” of the day. He said, “You hypocrites! You brood of vipers! You strain out a camel and swallow a gnat.”

People don’t follow us because we are dressed up and shiny, with long hair or short. They want to know our Jesus when we show our brokenness and need of a Savior.

They take a second look when we show them we don’t have our shit together. There I said it.

This sentence shocked me when I read it going through my Clumsy Bloggers course. It reverberated through every system in my body and left me confused. Why did he use that word? Why did I? Why didn’t we edit it? Addie Zierman put this on her blog in preface to her book coming out. It truly ministered to me and showed me God is bigger than our profanity and will go to endless lengths to meet with us, no matter how dusty and filthy the road is to get there.

I don’t want to be such a sanitized Christian that I’m reaching for my germ-x every time I come in contact with someone who makes me uncomfortable. And I don’t want to edit my life until it looks like I don’t need Jesus. Jesus went to great lengths to meet with the sinners of the day. He offered them life, to follow Him, in exchange for everything. Am I willing to smell like cigarette smoke to speak truth to and love on my neighbor?

I usually speak clean words. I try to hold my life together and look like I know what I’m doing. But most times, my husband checks the dryer (when they’re not in the washer – oo, sorry!) for his socks and dinner is just getting started when he walks through the door. I don’t have it together. I fear what could happen if I drop the ball because I feel like I should be coordinated enough to keep it spinning.

It’s in this chaos I meet Jesus. He is bigger than our inadequacies, mess ups and failures. Jesus didn’t come to make us stronger, give us more money and success. He came to give us new life in Him. He meets us by the boat that we fished in all night and caught nothing and says, “Hey, cast on the other side.” When we obey that crazy, insane voice, we find ourselves with another problem: How do we pull in all these fish while our net is breaking?

So I have a confession: I love short, crazy, spiky, even green hair and I think God does too!

Rich Mullins was also someone who didn’t have it all together, maybe that’s why I connected to this video –