Disappearing until your beard has grown.

+Concealment is hard, especially when being seen is so much easier.

I’ll confess that I find it hard to conceal myself. There are times when I know I should take a backseat or withhold certain information but I refuse. I love sharing my life with people mostly because I simply have far too much going on in my mind and to keep it all in, at times, I feel I would combust. Dramatic I know but that’s me.

Last year when I stopped publishing for a period it was because I desperately needed to regroup. God was making it clear that there is a necessity in sometimes going off grid and it became apparent to me through 2 Samuel 10.

In this passage, King David’s kindness is greatly misconstrued. The servants, whom he sent to bring peace and comfort to the son of a recently departed King of the Ammonites, were sorely defiled and abused. I’ll leave it to you to read for yourself the details of their treatment by the Ammonites. Returning as dejected and “greatly ashamed” men, King David went to meet them after hearing the about the ordeal. His answer was simple, kind of elusive but it was accurate and wise advice- he told them “Wait at Jericho until your beards have grown, and then return.”

As God always does, He made me see myself in the scripture. I situated myself as those servants, fed up and embarrassed for publicly writing for so long and having nothing to show for it. Feeling like I too had endured a similar abuse in having my work misconstrued or ignored/ridiculed. But the Lord was telling me to wait; to know that as a beard doesn’t grow overnight, nor does recognition, success or accomplishment. Hayley Record (nee Mulenda), an International Speaker and author expressed on a podcast that, today, we are in an epidemic of wanting to have the reward of 7 years work from only 7 months of diligence- stately for matters of exposure. I paraphrase as she actually used Olympian Usain Bolt to illustrate and so if I can find the video again I will link below, but I just want to give Mrs Record the credit for opening my eyes to the hastiness (and drives) of our pursuits.

I personally think that King David gave profound advice. He didn’t tell his men to go charging back and slaughter them all as revenge, nor to circulate a round of gossip to cause harm and reproach for the Ammonite people; instead he looked at his men and prioritised their wellbeing in the ordeal, finding it best to advise them to take time away to build themselves up, that way they will be impenetrable if another strike was to happen.

In the time of growth you are deep in reflection. There is a lot of shifting this and shifting that, neglecting this to prioritise that. I don’t know what may have struck you when you first put yourself out there but remember that things can grow back if you give it space to. As servants we too are catapulted into places that can cause us harm, be it emotional, physical or psychological. But going from wound to wound will never have you being a presentable and fully functioning human being. In essence, David wanted the men to return being bigger and better than they ever were before. The tame kind of revenge which in modern times we would interpret as a bullied student returning to a high school reunion 20 years later having the most successful career in the entire class, especially more so than his/her bully. We have to be prepared to do the work but also hide it.

Social media doesn’t accommodate the notion of letting your beard grow. We all want to see the process. “How many weeks of the stubble phase?”; “what oil is best to use?”; “when will we be able to get it to a braidable length?” etc. We have an answer—and image—for every part of the process we are going through. Whilst this power of relatability is comforting in some instances, we run the risk of homogenising or even reducing the process and therefore disregarding what is supposed to be transforming us as individuals. But just as I have been writing in yesterday’s piece about MAGA, and in my cultural newsletter about mediation and placement, we have to choose our mediums carefully—they have the power to make or break a potential success story. In other words, we must be willing to let the work show rather than run to show the work. Keep the process sacred, sanctified and secret.

Beautiful things do not beg to be seen.

-Sarah J.

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See you on the last Sunday of Feb.