There’s this saying: I cried that I had no shoes until I met a man who had no feet.

Easter weekend I found myself handing drinks and dessert out of a food truck to homeless people.

It’s what my brother does, and he’d invited me and our mother into that space.

Like the time Jesus said, Come and see…

So we went.

~

A couple years ago while other people were coming down with the flu and the seasonal cold, I got the cancer.

That’s a whole other story, but there’s one lingering detail that never would heal: my hurt feelings.

God is kind, far, far beyond our most generous fantasies of Him, so as only He can, He used that sickness to heal a whole bunch of things, too many to go into right now, but something that never gained one fleck of redemption was the fact that I’d lost all my hair.

Most people lose their hair during chemotherapy treatments, I know this.

But it really, really bothered me that I was bald as a bowling ball.

My Mama was a beautician when I was younger and Daddy built her beauty shop right onto our blue house, so my favorite memories are of playing Beauty Shop with her.

She was a bit miffed at God when she learned my hair was slipping out like corn silks faster than I could throw it away, because that was our thing—that was special, and she’d asked God not to let that happen.

It used to offend me when I’d read what Paul wrote about how a woman’s hair is her glory. I thought it was none of his business, until mine fell out in my hand.

With no hair, I had no confidence, and with no confidence, I had no glory—no inside glow.

No wonder when some pastors get wound up they pronounce it glow-ry.

Anyway, that’s what had bothered me most.

~

So a few weeks ago, it was Easter Saturday, the day we close our eyes and feel the ache of in-between, when all can seem lost and dead and unredeemable.

That’s the day I met Bama.

She was tiny, wearing oversized men’s clothes. Everything about her was gray, raspy, and calloused, except her brilliant sense of humor.

When she stomped up to the food truck window, I said, Hello! What can I get for you?

She snorted through her smile, Don’t matter. I live in the woods!

After collecting a few desserts for her pockets and telling me about her pet coyote, she left, leaving me to look to my brother, full of questions.

He was about to break my heart, but for good reason.

God had a story to tell me.

Sometimes He doesn’t tell us how He uses things in our lives, like losing our hair, but instead He gives us perspective, and that’s enough to hush questions that don’t matter anymore.

My brother leaned in and told me about the first time he met Bama.

It’s a little graphic, so if you’re delicate you might want to stop reading.

He was on a visit to the homeless camp where she lives in the woods. He doesn’t call them homeless. He calls them friends and he knows them by name.

Bama had just returned from a chemotherapy treatment.

I didn’t know there was such a thing as homeless people getting chemo treatments, with nowhere to go afterward. I’d never even thought about it.

He said she was throwing up, and she’d cuss for a while until she threw up again.

Her hair was falling out, and she’d pull out fistfuls, letting it fall to the ground, spitting mad that she was too sick to even turn tricks.

In the woods.

As I listened, my brother’s face faded behind a memory of myself when I had cancer: I saw myself, sick and balding, at home.

When I wasn’t lying in a clean Tempur-Pedic bed I sat in my husband’s recliner under a clean homemade quilt.

My mama moved in with us during that time to cook and take care of our daughters while my husband waited on me hand and foot.

I had every kind of medicine at my disposal. I had visitors and gifts and pink petunias spinning in the wind outside my window.

It was awful. Don’t get me wrong—you don’t ever want to experience cancer.

But compared to what Bama endured, by herself, in the woods….

Perspective is God’s way of waving His Hand over our lives and changing everything without changing anything at all, except us.

My brother had tried to console me during that time when I was pouting under a wig by reminding me that he has been bald for years, but he’s handsome, so it doesn’t count.

But this time, with God’s gentle help, he succeeded.

By the time he finished telling me Bama’s story, I was cured of resentment by a little thing called gratitude.

I’m not saying gratitude heals everything. It doesn’t, but this isn’t a story about being thankful.

It’s a story about Bama, the woman who survived cancer while living in the woods.

~