The Hancock-Henderson Quill, Inc.
I’ve always been concerned about my ‘looks.’ How I looked never measured up to how Paul Newman, Tom Cruise or Clint Eastwood looked.
My great disappointment began when I was around five. I remember the moment clearly. I looked in the mirror and discovered I had a patch of hair sticking up on the right side of my forehead like a petrified forest. Every attempt to make it lie down flat failed.
I went screaming to my mother, demanding to k now what curse had befallen me. She calmly assured me I would live, and that it was only a harmless cow lick.
“Cow lick!” I thundered. “You let a cow lick me?”
She used some big word I didn’t know as if to say it was my fate to have a cow lick. Some fate. To this day, I’m cursed by that cow lick.
Midway through my first-grade year, it was discovered I couldn’t see past my nose. That led to the thickest glass lenses conceived by mankind. I dared not gaze at a simple light bulb as the extreme magnification would have instantly turned my eyeballs to crispy orbs. Now, I was a boy with coke bottle glasses and a cow lick.
At age twelve, I discovered my age equaled my weight. Hide and seek was easy for me. I only had to turn sideways to disappear. While other boys grew biceps, I creeped along with two willow branches for arms.
Ah, the teenage years. A cow lick, nerdy glasses, skinny as a flamingo’s leg. And zits. It seemed like zillions of them at the time. Popping up at the most inopportune time. The saving grace was all the girls writing in my yearbook, “You’re a funny guy.” Except for Carolyn. She wrote, “You’re cut.” I think she meant ‘cute,’ but I don’t really know. At least there was that.
April eventually came along. We met in a lunch line at college. She was beautiful. I was not. We enjoyed lunch together, and I walked her back to her dorm. Years later I found out she was thinking, “When is this guy going to leave?” Had to be the cow lick, right?
Old age has hit me square between my cow lick and my coke bottle glasses. Wrinkles sprinkled everywhere like someone went crazy with an etching pen. A receding hairline. Except for the cow lick of course. It taunts me every day. If I was a woman, people would suspect I’m with child.
On the other hand, I’m in excellent shape. Philippians 3:20-21 tells me so: “For our citizenship is in heaven, from which also we eagerly wait for a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ; who will transform the body of our humble state into conformity with the body of His glory, by the exertion of the power that He has even to subject all things to Himself.”
In 1 Corinthians 15:42-44, we find these words: “So also is the resurrection of the dead. It is sown a perishable body, it is raised an imperishable body; it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power; it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body.”
Throughout life, we number all our physical and mental shortcomings, and always find ourselves wanting and insufficient. “If only I…” becomes the beginning of many of our sentences. Ultimately, life is a daily trudge towards death. And then what?
Wondrously, every believer in Christ eventually finds the metaphorical pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. An everlasting transformation takes place in the most glorious aspects. Gone are the coke bottle glasses, the wrinkles, the receding hairline and the potbelly stomach. As for the cow lick, it simply doesn’t matter anymore.
Sadly, we want perfection now. Our prayers often reflect those desires. However, if we can bring our minds and hearts to focus upon the future glorification of every aspect of our lives: physically, mentally and spiritually, we can rest in the easy yoke of glorification. It’s a good place to rest.