Farrah’s Hair & Living with Regrets

Women and their hair.  Need I say more?  Ladies, go ahead and exhale.  No judgments here. You may have straight hair and have always wanted the curly locks of Nicole Kidman.  Or maybe in a haste you tried an at home perm and that didn’t work out so well.

I have my own set of hair issues some of which were most unfortunate decisions on my part.

As a youngster, I opened up the pages of one of my mom’s magazines.  A one page article on how to obtain the Farrah Fawcett look caught my eye.

Ooohhh, I wanted that look.  I already had practice on styling the hair-do because I had a hand-me down Farrah Fawcett head doll.

You know you have hit the pinnacle of hair fashion when they don’t even make a doll of your whole body, but just your head!   You couldn’t even play dolls with her because she didn’t have arms and legs…literally it was just Farrah’s head.  All you could do hour after hour was style her hair.

The article had one major flaw; it made the bodacious claim that anyone could look like Farrah with four easy clips of the scissors.  I showed the article to my mom and begged her to get out her kitchen shears.  I must have been persuasive because in a matter of minutes I was sitting in front of the bathroom mirror and the magazine open on the bathroom counter.

Clips one and two, things were fine.  Clip three I began to wonder if this was a good idea.  And on the fourth and final clip I knew in my heart that things had gone wrong– terribly wrong.  I didn’t have Farrah’s gorgeous sweeping wings.  I had Danny Bonaduce’s hair!

So what happens when we make a decision and then later, sometimes instantly, regret the decision?  Now I rejoice, not that you were made sorry, but that your sorrow led to repentance.   For godly sorrow produces repentance leading to salvation, not to be regretted (2 Corinthians 7:9-10).  Regret can actually be useful in our lives.  It either strengthens our relationship with God or drives us further away from Him.

The Message says it like this, Distress that drives us to God…It turns us around. It gets us back in the way of salvation. We never regret that kind of pain. But those who let distress drive them away from God are full of regrets, end up on a deathbed of regrets.

Looking back on a bad decision allows us to see where we went wrong, where we strayed from God, or where we were blind to something.  Regret can drive us back to God.  It causes us to seek God’s face and His forgiveness.  When we run to God, He sets us back on our feet.  I run for dear life to God, I’ll never live to regret it.  Do what you do so well: get me out of this mess and up on my feet. (Ps. 71:1)

So whatever your regret, allow the sorrow and pain from that decision to redirect you back to God.  In the process, He’ll set you back on your feet and so you can take the next steps in life.