How To Be Thankful When Things Kinda Suck
Thanksgiving reflections on acceptance and God's will
A few weeks ago, my daughter cut off her hair.
If you know my daughter in real life, this is completely unsurprising to you. You don’t need to guess which daughter; you already know. In fact, if I told you merely that I met someone who had cut off all of their hair, you would instantly guess this particular child. She is fiercely independent and scarily smart; she is the kind of person who thinks “my hair is in my face” and decides to grab a scissors from her art cart and chop it off. This is the child that I frequently say with all seriousness will either be the CEO of a Fortune 500 company or the head of an international crime ring.
Her hair was long and pretty; I loved putting it in “Elsa braids” or pigtails. It fit her personality, too--as rambunctious as she is she’s also as glamorous as the day is long. She wants to wear pink and sparkles and bows while she’s ruling the world, thank you very much. But after Le Chop, the purple-haired “stylist” at Great Clips had to give her a very short bob a la Ramona Quimby.
After a few brief tears at the salon, she got over it pretty quickly. Her brother had a semi-rare moment of big-brother kindness and told her she looked like Rapunzel at the end of Tangled, which thrilled her. And she’s an adorable kid—she’s honestly working it well.
But the first few days of her new hair left me with an immense feeling of sadness every time I looked at her.
Even though I’d actually wanted her to try out a bob and had suggested it before, even though it was every bit as cute as I knew it would be, even though we had a talk about scissors safety and she can no longer reach them, even though she’s told me smugly that she loves her new haircut, I still found myself longing for her little girl locks.
I couldn’t lean into the weird, different beauty of the now because I found myself continuing to picture her with her long hair. And it mirrored so many other ways in my life that I fail to enjoy the beauty of the now, always looking for what was, or what might be, or what I mistakenly thought I was in control of.
Fr. Walter Ciszek, the Jesuit priest I love so dearly who spent many years in a Siberian prison camp, writes frequently in He Leadeth Me about the importance of living in the here-and-now of reality. He says: "His will for us was in the twenty-four hours of each day: the people, the places, the circumstances He set before us in that time. Those were the things God knew were important to Him and to us at that moment, and those were the things upon which He wanted us to act."
For a long time, this was hard for me to understand. It’s still hard for me, if I’m being honest, to understand. What if you’re working for an unjust employer who berates you and cheats you out of your earned paycheck? Are you just supposed to accept that because it’s God’s will for you to be in that circumstance? What if you’re living under an oppressive government? Are you just supposed to accept that oppression?