Go Pluck Yourself

I grab the tweezers and lean in close to the mirror.  Bracing for the pain, I stretch the skin taut and take a firm hold on the stray hair- and then *pluck*!

OWWWWW! Man..that one smarted!

Let me just say before I jump into the life illustration, the woman who told me “the more you pluck, the thinner and less likely your eyebrows are to grow back” lied through her teeth!  But I whole-heartedly believed her because, well, she was one of those women who so obviously had suffered a vicious waxing/plucking accident losing any trace of brow in the process and overcompensated by drawing a crazy-high arch in the middle of her forehead with a pencil that clearly was not in the range of natural hair color.  But I’ve been plucking for years and so far, no luck in the “not growing back” department.

This morning when I was jerking short, fat-follicled hairs out of my eyebrows it occurred to me that habits-good and bad- are quite like my eyebrows.

1)      I have sparse, but super-long eyebrow hairs for the most part. I’m consistently doing the eyebrow version of the bald man’s comb-over. Kind of like the good habits I have, I’m often found stretching them, fitting them in places where they don’t necessarily belong in an effort to hide the places there is a lack.

2)      I have a uni-brow.  It’s tragic, but true.  I have tons of eyebrow in places where I clearly don’t want them to be (think soul patch in the middle of my forehead.) Like bad habits and sin, I have to regularly pluck these lil devils- sometimes daily- to keep them from cropping up where they are not wanted.

3)      Sometimes good ones have to be trimmed or plucked for the good of the overall brow.  Every now and then there are a couple of hairs that are normally well-behaved, that just won’t conform to the comb-over. Most of the time I trim these, in the hopes that they will continue to grow in a way that works with the whole brow- but sometimes the good ones have to be plucked out to make room for an even better one to grow.  Much like habits, sometimes you need to change even a good, successful habit in order to make room for an awesome one.

4)      Plucking hurts. Sometimes it makes my eyes water and leaves a red mark.  Sometimes I barely notice it.  Most of the time, the hairs I have to pluck over and over again are less painful to weed out.  Just like behaviors and habits and sin that have to die each day as we grow and change and groom ourselves to be beautiful reflections of God’s image, those things we have to pluck out each day become less painful in the long run.

So there you have it- life lessons from eyebrow plucking.

What about you? What habits do you need to pluck out today?