Same Sheep, Less Wool

For nearly ten years, I have been growing my hair and beard.

In the beginning, I had reasons.

After chemotherapy, I was told my hair might never grow back.

When it did, I wanted to know what it would become.

How long would my hair grow?

What would my terminal beard look like?

So I let it grow.

Somewhere across those years, I didn’t forget why. I simply stopped remembering.

The reasons were still there.

I could have told you if you asked. But I no longer carried them consciously into each day.

And life kept happening.

The reasons remained. New meanings accumulated.

At one point, I grew my hair long enough to cut and donate it while mourning the death of a beloved friend.

Then I grew it again.

What began as curiosity about what my body could still do became something I could give in response to someone else’s death.

And then, eventually, it became just hair.

Until I cut it.

A few days ago, I cut my hair short and shaved my beard.

For the first time in a long time, I saw a face I hadn’t forgotten.
I simply hadn’t seen it in a while. Mine.

And while I was remembering it, something else was happening.

Some of the children in my life were meeting that face for the first time.

My son has known me his whole life, of course. But much of the face he knows is the one shaped by the hair and beard I began growing after chemotherapy.

The face that looked familiar again to me was, in some ways, new to him.

We were meeting again, but for the first time.

What felt like remembering to me could be discovery to someone else.

Same person. Different encounter.

The Treasure

This Sunday, the Gospel reading was from Matthew 13.

Jesus moves through image after image trying to describe the kingdom of heaven: a mustard seed, yeast hidden in flour, treasure hidden in a field, a merchant searching for a pearl.

As I listened, I started scribbling associations on a piece of paper.

Seed → Spirit
Yeast → Catalyst
Treasure → Truth
Pearl → Coherence

Then I crossed out Truth.
It wasn’t right. The treasure wasn’t truth.

The treasure was remembering.

The treasure in the field was already there.
The person didn’t make it. He didn’t manufacture its value.
It was there before he encountered it.

Hidden isn’t the same as gone.

Maybe remembering isn’t always recovering something we’ve forgotten.
Maybe sometimes remembering is bringing back into the present something that never actually left us.

I hadn’t forgotten my face.
I hadn’t forgotten why I grew my hair.
I hadn’t forgotten what those years held.

I had simply stopped remembering.

And suddenly they were present again.

What the Hair Carried

The hair had never simply been hair.

At first, growing it was partly curiosity and partly witness.

I had been told it might never return. It did.
My body still grew. I was still here.

Then the hair carried something else.

Mourning.

I grew it long enough to donate after the death of a beloved friend.

Something that had once represented my own body’s return became something I could give away while grieving someone who would not return.

Then it grew again.

Maybe that’s what happens with some of the things we carry through life.
Their meaning isn’t fixed at the moment we pick them up.

Life keeps adding to them.

Survival.
Mourning.
Giving.
Growth.
And eventually, ordinary life.

The hair didn’t stop carrying those stories simply because I stopped thinking about them.

Not because they mattered less. Perhaps because meaning does not always need our attention to remain part of us.

Remembering Before Releasing

There is something important to me about that order.

I didn’t cut my hair because the last ten years no longer mattered.

Quite the opposite.

Perhaps I could finally cut it because I remembered what those years had meant.

There is a difference between discarding something because we want to escape it and releasing something because it no longer needs to carry the same meaning for us.

For much of the last decade, survival was necessarily close to the center of my life.

Cancer divided time into a before and an after.

For a while, simply continuing was enough.

And then continuing became living.

Life brought grief and friendship. Work and family. Loss and responsibility.
Questions I couldn’t answer and questions I hadn’t yet learned to ask.
Eventually, it brought me to seminary.

Somewhere in all of that, survival stopped needing to announce itself every morning when I looked in the mirror.

Perhaps surviving had done what it needed to do.
Perhaps surviving was supposed to return me to living.
And perhaps remembering that is part of the treasure.

An Either/Or I Had Been Carrying

Hair isn’t the only thing I’ve been trying to understand.

For more than twenty years, much of my life has been lived in finance and operations. Now I am also in seminary, being formed toward future ministry.

For a while, I kept trying to understand what one meant for the other.

Am I returning to professional work?

Or am I becoming a pastor?

Which life am I supposed to choose?

But this season of formation has been doing something quieter than answering the question.
It has been changing the question.

My professional life keeps showing up in my theological formation.

Stewardship. Organizations. Leadership. Systems. Human capacity. Value. Responsibility.

These aren’t ideas I left behind when I entered seminary.

And formation keeps showing up in how I understand my professional life.

I don’t see organizations quite the same way anymore.
I don’t see leadership quite the same way.
I don’t even see finance quite the same way.

Perhaps professional work and ministry aren’t competing identities.

Perhaps they are different expressions of the same life, each asking something of me in its season.

Maybe I was trying to make an either/or decision about things that time never asked me to hold simultaneously.

This season hasn’t necessarily been preparing me to choose one.

It may have been preparing me to face both, in time.

The Pearl

That brought me back to the last thing I had written on my scrap of paper.

Pearl → Coherence

The merchant recognizes one pearl of extraordinary value, and everything else is reordered by what he has found.

I’ve often thought of coherence as getting all the pieces to fit.

I’m less certain of that now.

Maybe coherence doesn’t require every part of our lives to happen at once.

There was a season when surviving needed most of me.
There was a season when growing my hair meant discovering what my body could still do.
There was a season when that same hair became something I could give away in mourning.

There is a season for formation.
There can be a season for returning fully to professional work.
There may be another season when ministry asks something different of me.

One doesn’t have to invalidate another.

Coherence may simply mean no longer needing one season to deny another.

Professional work does not have to interrupt formation. Formation does not require me to diminish the professional life that has formed so much of who I already am. And future ministry does not need to be rushed into the present to prove that the journey toward it is real.

What one season forms in us can accompany us into another.

Perhaps wisdom is not knowing which identity wins.
Perhaps wisdom is learning what this season is asking us to live.

Same Sheep

A few days ago, I sat in a barber’s chair and watched the latest growth fall away.

It wasn’t ten years of hair on the floor. But it was ten years of growing.

That distinction matters. Because those years weren’t one continuous story about surviving cancer.

They were a life.

A life in which something I was once told I might never grow again grew long enough to be given away. And then grew again.

A life in which surviving gradually made room for grieving, giving, working, learning, forming, and perhaps now returning.

And a life long enough that the face I was remembering could be a face my own son was encountering almost for the first time.

Nothing miraculous happened when the hair fell.

I was still me.

Maybe that was precisely the point.

Cutting it didn’t erase what it had carried.

It brought me back into relationship with why I had begun growing it—
and everything that had happened while it grew.

Maybe that is what treasure sometimes does.

It doesn’t give us something we didn’t have.
It brings into the present something we had stopped remembering.

And perhaps what returns isn’t the truth about who we must become.
Perhaps we simply remember who has been here through all of it.

We discover that remembering doesn’t require us to keep carrying everything exactly as it was.

Some things can be given away.

Some things can fall away.

Some things can grow again.

Same sheep.

Less wool.