Never Judge a Hairless Head or a Head Full of Hair!

One day a little girl come up to me in Wal-Mart while I was shopping. She didn't ask why I was bald, she just smiled at me, told me that I was pretty and that she loved my hat. She didn't question why I didn't have any hair, she just accepted me at face value. Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could all be like that?

Oh how sweet, you might be thinking? End of discussion . . . Wrong. We all know that we shouldn't judge a book by its cover, and yet we still do it. I bring this up because a fellow co-worker of mine has been growing his hair out for over a year. It’s not the best look on him, but he doesn't care. He keeps his hair clean and pulled back from his face, and he always looks neat. The other day I overheard someone say that they couldn't understand why he didn't cut his hair. These ladies continued to say that they thought he would look less grungy and sloppy if he’d just cut his hair.

When I overheard this conversation, I was furious. These women don’t know this young man is an absolutely hard worker with a heart of gold, all they see is a grungy kid with bad hair. What they don’t know is that for the last year, he’s been growing his hair out so that he can donate it to Locks of Love.  

I bring this up because when I was going through chemo I heard a lot of horror stories from my group of fellow cancer survivors about people approaching them in order to call them out. These people weren't coming up to make kind remarks like the little girl in Wal-Mart did to me. What they did was incomprehensible, because they were telling a woman with breast cancer that she needed to repent for her sins. This woman was then told that God was punishing her with cancer because she must be a wicked person.

WTH?

I don’t know about you, but the God, I know is a loving God. I also know that if you have cancer it is not because you need to repent for your sins or that you are a bad person! Having long hair does not make you a bad person, but speaking ill of others and judging someone is a sin, and it makes you a bad person for doing it in the first place!

Please, please, don’t judge someone for the way they look, you don’t know what they’re really going through, instead be kind, and if you can’t say something nice, don’ say anything at all!