Head Lice & God’s Grace

Count It as Joy, My Brothers

A few weeks ago head lice went around in one of my kid’s classes. Two of the kids who were out happened to be in my daughter’s little bestie group at school. We had lice about five years ago and it was a nightmare, so I immediately took every precaution I could and started combing hair with a lice comb religiously. 

It took two days to find live lice in her hair. It took two more days for it to show up on two more heads in this house. There are five long-haired ladies who live here — I just think it’s a miracle that two of us didn’t get it. 

Photo by Tamara Bellis on Unsplash

It took weeks of treating and combing before we got them all, thanks to super lice. Dozens of hours spent combing long hair and dozens of loads of laundry and hundreds (thousands?) of tears from both them and me.

If you’ve had lice in your house … you know. And if you haven’t … Well then count your lucky stars, because those little jerks don’t discriminate and will attack any head they can manage to climb onto. At one point I considered giving them all pixie cuts and being done with it. Fine — it was at multiple points. Lice are SO GROSS.

Meanwhile, I’ve been going through the book of James in my weekly Bible study. It’s the book that says right up front, “Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.”

Our lice infestation was definitely a trial, but not one I counted as joy. Maybe James meant other kinds of trials. Lice suck. Nothing good to say about them. At all. I’m not counting it as joy, James, even if you were Jesus’s brother. 

Sometimes I think God and I have different definitions of joy. How could I possibly count this as joy?

The same way that Paul said everything works for good.

I saw a TikTok video a while ago of a woman whose name I wish I had, but I hope I never forget her message. She tackled that verse in Romans, and said that people misunderstand “good” to be “comfort.” We sometimes have a tendency to think “all things will work together for my comfort,” but good doesn’t mean that.

She explained that she struggled with understanding that herself after her husband died young. She loved Jesus, so how could it be good that she was grieving intensely, and that she’d have to face all kinds of new challenges she never imagined thanks to being a young widow?

Because God grieves for us, and through her grieving, she was being sanctified. The whole goal when you love Jesus is to become more like Him, and she said that she started understanding God’s love for us in a whole new way.

I know it’s silly to put lice in the same category as something like a death, or a divorce, or unemployment, or infertility, or any number of other tragedies that exist in the world. 

What even is the purpose of lice? Why do they exist at all? What joy or good can be found in lice?

Well I have girls who have the assurance of their mother’s love. I got to have conversations with them I might not have had if I hadn’t spent hours combing. They’ve developed compassion by understanding that this can happen to anyone. It forced me to do some deep cleaning that needed to be done anyway.

It gave me a lot of time to touch their baby soft hair, which is a feeling I will hold onto until I go to my grave. It made me feel like a badass mom, taking care of my kiddos with TLC while controlling my ick-factor.

The infestation was not joyful, but the things that came out of it were.

There is a lot going on in the world right now, and it’s hard to look at it through the lenses of joy and goodness. Especially with a contentious election in America next week, and each side terrified about losing their freedoms.

But the fact that we get to live in a time and place where we even get to vote is incredible. Joyful, even! And no matter what happens, I will try my hardest to count the results as joy, because I know that for those who love God, all things work together for good for those who are called according to his purpose.

And if you are having a hard time counting anything as joy, just remember it could always be worse.

Your kid could bring lice home.