Captive Thoughts

I have very stubbornly curly hair that has a mind of its own! Any woman with my kind of hair knows what I am talking about. Just getting one’s hair to go all in the same general direction can be a major undertaking. So I either go to a beauty salon and let my wonderful hairdresser deal with it, or I take one wet strand of hair after another and carefully wind it around a plastic roller and hold it down with a sturdy hairpin.

Eventually, my hair dries either under the Southern California sun or under a dryer, and I am able to comb it out into a presentable format.

As I was going through this meticulous process this morning (my head is covered in multicolor rollers as I write), I thought of the apostle Paul’s letter to the Corinthians. He shared what it means to be true followers of Christ. He used the expression “bringing into captivity.” My mind made a sudden connection: Just as my stubborn hair resists being “brought into captivity,” I find that I, too, as a child of God, need to win victories in my life by submitting to Christ’s discipline. I cannot do this by myself any more than my hair can place itself on my rollers. It is an intentional process of daily living out the purposes of Christ in my life rather than my own purposes. When I was a teenager, I purposed never to wear makeup ever again.

So I would grab my lipstick and rouge and powder and throw them as far as I could into the brush growing along an embankment in our backyard.

Alas, I would wake up a couple of mornings afterward, looking haggard and wan and regretting my decision to discard the makeup. I would find myself furiously digging through the brush for the evidence of my erstwhile repentance and bring them sheepishly back into the house again. In my adolescent understanding of God, there was no hope for me in this merry-go-round kind of religion. Even so, I stuck with my religious faith, always in the hope of one day having the victories I so longed for. In later years, I learned that I would need to leave to God the task of bringing every thought and character defect into captivity to the One who has already won the victory. My task is only to let Him do it.

Lourdes E. Morales-Gudmundsson