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Welcome to Stuff I Learned Yesterday. My name is Darrell Darnell, the average person has between 90,000 and 150,000 hairs on their head, and I believe that if you aren’t learning, you aren’t living.
Today I’m going to share a personal secret with you that only my wife and my brother know about me. I’m not even going to make you wait for it. Here it is. For nearly a year now I have been using products to try and regrow my thinning hair. Today I’m going to tell you what that experience has taught me.
When I was younger it was fairly common for me to sit down for a haircut and get a compliment on how thick my hair was. In the summer, the barber would use thinning scissors to make my head more comfortable in the heat. I don’t know exactly when those things changed, but I can tell you it was many years ago.
Eventually I noticed that my front hairline was thinning. I’ve always had a pronounced widow’s peak and knew that thinning hair was just a natural part of aging. But last year I reached a point where my thinning hair was bothering me and I decided to look into doing something about it.
You may recall that in the fall of 2023 I bought a car that is a convertible. By the time I repaired it, it was winter. So on an early spring day last year my wife and I were enjoying one of the first days we’d had to enjoy the car with the top down. To celebrate, we took a photo. What I noticed is that when the sun was shining brightly on my head, my hair was even thinner than I realized.
I talked to Kari about it and she assured me that she has no issues whatsoever with my hair. However, she also had no issues with me trying to do something about it. So I began researching different options. I eventually decided to go the route of applying drops of minoxidil to my scalp twice a day. The product said that my hair would first thin as weak hairs fell out and were replaced with thicker, healthier hairs. It also said I could start seeing improvement in as little as 60 days.
In May, Kari and I celebrated our 25th wedding anniversary and we decided to celebrate by taking a cruise out of Port Canaveral, Florida on the Disney Wish. I was very much looking forward to the time away with Kari, and by that time I was fairly certain my hair was starting to show signs of getting thicker.
I don’t know about other cruise lines, but the cabins on a Disney cruise have 2 bathrooms. One bathroom has a sink and toilet, while the other bathroom has a sink and shower. We love it because it allows both of us to get ready at the same time.
I stand just under 6 feet tall and the ceiling in the cabin is 7 feet. However, the bathrooms are raised just a bit off the floor, which means their ceiling height is only 6.5 feet. We woke up that first morning as we were arriving into the port in Nassau. After watching the ship go through the docking process I decided to get ready and head down for breakfast.
I popped into the bathroom, turned on the light, and was surprised by what I saw in the mirror. It was very, very clear that my hair was NOT getting thicker.
Our bathroom at home is fairly spacious. I have my own sink and counter, and Kari has her own sink and counter. There are 4 light bulbs above my mirror and there’s a large window on the wall that flanks the right side of the room as I’m standing at the mirror. It’s there each day that I stand applying drops of minoxidil and studying my scalp for signs of new growth.
It’s a well-lit room, so it came as a surprise that the tiny cruise ship bathroom revealed things that my bathroom at home did not. What made the difference? The placement of the light. The inside of that cruise ship bathroom didn’t have much room. That low ceiling, coupled with a light that was placed directly above my head revealed the truth. The truth was, my hair didn’t measure up to what I’d come to believe to be true.
Here’s what I learned.
As I stood there looking at my thinning hair in the mirror and seeing what the light had revealed, a passage from John came to mind. The New Testament book of John was written by one of Jesus’ disciples, named John, of course. He had an extremely close relationship with Jesus and wrote the book of John sometime between 30 and 50 years after Jesus’ resurrection.
He wrote what is likely the most memorized verse of the Bible, John 3:16 which says, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.”
It’s a great passage, but the passage that came to mind that morning on the cruise ship was just a few verses later starting in verse 19. It says, “The light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come into the light, lest his works should be exposed.”
Simply put, my hair looked a lot better in the darker light of my home bathroom. Here in the bright light of the cruise ship bathroom, the truth of my hair’s flaws and shortcomings had been exposed. I certainly wished I’d stayed away from the light.
And that’s the choice we all have. The Bible teaches us about God, his light, his standard. When we’re exposed to that, our own blemishes become fully revealed for the truth that they are. That is, they fall short. The BIble tells us our righteousness is like filthy rags. So how do we respond to being exposed? We can go back to darkness so that our flaws are covered up and not seen. That’s one option and it’s certainly understandable.
The other option is to realize that life is better in the light. Not because of anything we’ve done or can do. It’s not our light. We’re not creating the light. It’s God’s light and we’re the beneficiaries of it.
John not only wrote the gospel of John, but he wrote three other smaller New Testament books, I, II, and III John. in I John he wrote: “This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all. If we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth. But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin. If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.
It’s not fun to be exposed whether it’s related to your receding hairline or your personal sin. Trust me. I know about both of these all too well. We humans do a pretty good job of convincing ourselves that we have our moral act together. We have a sin problem, every single one of us. And God is holy, morally perfect.
Jesus teaches that the only way a perfect God and a sinful Darrell can be reconciled is if I choose to humble myself before God and throw myself upon His mercy. And the way that God offers mercy and forgiveness is through the death of his son Jesus on the cross.
I love the simplicity of John’s teaching when he said, “if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” Once we’ve done that, we’ll find being close to the light is amazing, and better than anything we could have ever hoped or imagined it could be or that the darkness could ever offer.
I’m Darrell Darnell, and this has been Stuff I Learned Yesterday.
I want you to be a part of the next Monday Mailbag on March 31st! Monday Mailbag is your opportunity to Share what YOU’VE learned, so that other listeners and I can learn from YOU. It can be a message as short as 30 seconds or several minutes long. It really doesn’t matter just as long as it’s something that will benefit others. You can send in questions or responses to my SILY episodes, and I’ll respond to them via Monday Mailbag episodes. You can send in questions or responses to my SILY episodes, and I’ll respond to them via Monday Mailbag episodes. You can participate in Monday Mailbags by visiting the Golden Spiral Media listener feedback page.