I’m a chicken. I don’t want to deal with a bloody mess.
When I was 19 my mom joked that my eyebrows were “sadbrows”.
They needed some waxing and shaping so that I didn’t look sad all the time, so I ventured out and got them taken care of and over the years I had stuck to waxing.
I recently learned however, that a woman around the corner from me shapes eyebrows using a process called does ‘sugaring’ so I bit the bullet and went. I was terrified of coming home like a bloody mess – or at least feeling like I was a bloody mess.
I had no clue how sugaring works. In fact, I should have googled it just to understand what the heck she was putting on my brows because I had no idea, but I did notice a difference, between my usual waxing method and sugaring.
With waxing, they use a little wooden stick and you can feel it is very accurate as they trace it under your brow to get a clean line. No concerns.
With the sugering technique, it felt like she was slopping it all over the place and inside I was panicking.
I fully expected my brows to be gone when she showed me the end results!
Thankfully, they were still on my face and beautifully shaped. Although it felt like a goopy mess, they looked great after. No more sad eyes!
I didn’t give it a second thought until later.
I was forcing myself to list things in my gratitude journal that I was thankful for. This had been quite a challenge for me, as I felt like I had been in a hole of depression for quite some time.
I wrote that I was thankful for how the sugaring felt like it was going to be a bloody mess until I saw the clean results.
Such a weird and funny thing.
That led my thoughts down the path to how God works. I think He’s in the business of sugaring.
Sometimes in life it feels like He is smearing the sugar all over the place…not precisely, not carefully, just a free for all. Sometimes it worries me that He is in a ‘bloody mess business’.
At times It can feel like God is ripping my life apart to such an extent that in the end I’m going to have nothing left, or at least nothing beautiful or nothing that I asked for in the first place.
When He is done and He holds the mirror up so I can see, I expect to be devastated with the end result. But when it felt like He was out of control or had no control, it turns out He knew exactly what He was doing, and He only ripped out the unwanted or unnecessary things.
Let me give you a specific example of this.
There was one year in my life where I felt that every last life hair was being ripped out. I felt my life being ripped to shreds in a bloody mess.
It started when I discovered my first husband had kept some serious secrets from me. I asked him to move out while I sorted out what we/I was going to do.
Two weeks later I found out that he was having an affair.
As my marriage was reeling, I went to sell the house and my realtor acted unethically and I lost $20,000 on the sale of my house. This resulted in having to consult a lawyer and going to the real estate board.
Can you hear the life hairs being ripped out?
Four weeks after signing a deal to purchase a house, there was a fire which would lead to 8 months of restoration.
I continued to live with my parents and found a new place to work since I had previously worked from my home.
My estranged husband was arrested and I tried to visit him in prison so that he wasn’t lonely, all the while fighting a barrage of emotions. As crazy as this sounds, when he was finally released, I gave my marriage another shot.
I never wanted my daughter to say that I didn’t try my hardest. And boy, did I try. When it became clear that some things hadn’t changed, I ended it, three days before Christmas.
I can tell you it was not a Happy New Year either.
After that year, if God had pulled out a mirror, I would have expected my life’s eyebrows to be butchered…massacred…a bloody mess.
Miracle of miracles, though, that isn’t what happened. Like my eyebrows my life was red and swollen, still tender to the touch and stinging occasionally.
All those things were just God pulling the unwanted things into the sugar.
Whether it was tangible things like a marriage, a house, money or even my emotions, I realised that God wanted to rip out and reshape my insecurities and my faith.
He had made me stronger than I ever thought I was! Life could be good with less than what I thought. Life could be good without a man or marriage. I didn’t need as much money or as many things as I thought. One step at a time and I was able to get through it all with Him.
With the support of my amazing family, friends, AND clients, I finally experienced peace.
Maybe my life wasn’t a bloody mess after all.
Good doesn’t necessarily look the same for everybody. I think God has so many different pictures of “good”. But right now, my good looks like this:
I met a man who is tender, patient, compassionate and trustworthy.
My daughter Summer and I have such a crazy bond from being on our own together.
I always wanted 4 children and so it was perfect that Ted had three to bring into the picture. Summer calls him ‘daddy’ and means it with all her heart. Ted calls her ‘his daughter’ and means it with all his heart.
Most of all, I can see how God has carried me through. So now I’ve got that in my memory bank the next time I need to be ‘sugared’.
You can connect with Nancy on IG and her Blog
If you enjoyed Nancy’s post you can read more here.