Because He is Love – Part 3

I wouldn’t wish Trichotillomania to my worst enemies. I am afraid if I get married I will pass the genes to my children because Trichotillomania is genetic, it is classified as an impulse control disorder by DSM-IV, it is the compulsive urge to pull out one’s own hair leading to noticeable hair loss. For most of my life I had considered it to be a curse—or at least something I wouldn’t want in my life. But sometimes when I think about it I wonder if God has a purpose in it—a higher purpose than just “to torture me”.

You see, Trichotillomania really lowered my self-confidence due to my low self-image. It is not easy for a young man to be confident when he can’t even control his fingers so not to pull his own hair. It is not easy for a young man to be confident when he feel embarrassed and ashamed of the missing patches on his scalp hair that seem to change positions every couple of months. Yet this low self-confidence somehow drove me to God—because I didn’t believe in myself I had to believe in something or someone to carry on, to live.

Faith is integral to every aspect of our daily lives: it takes faith to even flick a light switch on…How do we know the light will turn on? We don’t, but we believe it will and so we flick the switch on. So it is impossible to carry on a relatively normal and progressive life without faith, hope, and certain amount of confidence in circumstances. And since I didn’t believe in myself I had to draw on that confidence from God, and I have to admit that I trusted in Him to an unhealthy degree. At a point of my life I wondered about His will in the silliest life situations–situations that were so trivial and so unrelated to spiritual living.

So I remember a couple of situations that I think saved me from going down the wrong paths. Both situations where in high school here in Canada. The first time a couple of classmates asked me if I wanted to go play tennis with them, and I love tennis, but because of trich I knew I didn’t want to go outside in daylight around people—I preferred to stay home in my hiding place. The next day one of the classmates told me they smoked their first “joint” after playing tennis (I am guessing, it was marijuana), and I thought to myself, “Thank God I didn’t go with them.” Sometime later they had a birthday party of one of the classmates and as usual I decided to hide away from people than be among people. The next day they told me they had a stripper and things got pretty immoral. And I remember thinking, “Thank God I didn’t go with them.”

Echoes of Eden by Fadi

So yes, due to the way I responded to trich I led a very unhealthy introvert social-less life, but in many ways that protected me from a lot of bad things. You know what I learned from life? If you have an unhealthy low self-confidence God can drive you to Him, and after you find Him, He will change you and give you a healthy self-confidence based on who you are in Him. But if you have an unhealthy high self-confidence–or should I rather say being arrogant, prideful and feel self-sufficient–it is almost impossible that you will find Him. That’s why breaks us before He can get our attention. So may be trich is not a curse after all, and may be it is neither a blessing either, may be God didn’t engineer it into my genes (may be I simply inherited it from my parents)…all I know is that trich hasn’t been all bad. God somehow used something I already have and got something good out of it. Not that it didn’t have major bad side effects on me, but it did have some good results too.

The old hymn says,“Count your blessings, name them one by one, Count your blessings, see what God hath done!” But may be our blessings are more than what we are counting, may be some of our “curses” are actually blessings because He is love and He wants, He chooses, to love us. It is just that His definition of love and His methods are different than ours. If you don’t believe me remember this: He chose the Cross to express His love to us (the last method we would’ve chosen!)