Of Girls and Hair

Inevitably, there was a girl at the base I liked. She was another Dutch Canadian like my friend Heather from King’s Kids. This girl was one of the students in one of the schools. Technically, now that I was 17, I was old enough for a relationship that could potentially lead to marriage. But that wasn’t my intention. I just liked her and like all relationships with girls I had had up to that point, I just intended to keep it as a friendship unless something else developed down the road.

However, when I mentioned it to one of the guys on the non-Russ side, he advised me to go ahead and let her know about my feelings. The advice didn’t feel right but I took it anyway. I’m always better at writing rather than talking so I wrote her a note. She sent me a note back that embarrassed me and made me wish I had not taken the advice.

She wrote me the very same relationship philosophy that I had been living out for the past several years! She wanted to stay focused on the school and just be friends and if anything came of it way down the road, we’d just take that as it came. I knew I should have just ignored the guy’s recommendation.

The girl was kind but inevitably, things became a little awkward between us. The guy that gave me the advice had been married recently and he did not treat his wife very well, even in front of others. He was very demeaning and would even made her cry. I felt badly for her. So basically, he was a jerk and I decided that that was the wrong camp to hang with. Thereafter, I was very firmly in the Russ camp.

I had another incident involving relationships with girls but this time it was humorous. One of my roommates was a guy from Florida named Brady and one night we got into an argument. He was telling me that I should stay away from girls because they would break my heart. I was telling him that I wouldn’t let them. He kept insisting and I kept denying. It was a friendly argument but we kept getting louder and louder until we were yelling. Suddenly, we heard a knock on the door. It was an angry mother telling us to be quiet because her children were sleeping.

I grew a beard in Switzerland. I still had a moustache but I had never let my beard grow. I wanted to see how it would turn out. I also wanted to be able to say that I grew a beard at 17. I grew a beard at 17. It came in nicely and I took a picture in one those photo booths to prove it. My wife says the picture makes me look like a terrorist.

I had another hairy experience in Switzerland when I had my worst haircut ever. In YWAM, there is usually someone who cuts hair for free or for a very reasonable price. I had the YWAM stylist in Lausanne cut my hair but I wasn’t always completely happy. One day, I decided to use some of my limited money to go to a salon in town. Unfortunately, the hairdresser didn’t speak English and I didn’t speak French. I tried to communicate to her that I wanted it short on the bottom, long on the top and blended in between. There was someone there who spoke limited English who translated for me.

I was watching in the mirror as she worked. She proceeded to cut it very short on the bottom and then I thought she was going to blend it in with the length on top. But all of a sudden, she was done. She had given me a bowl cut – short on the bottom and long on the top - which was a popular European New Wave look. I was not that kind of person.

I couldn’t communicate with her how disappointed I was and I was so embarrassed that I just gave her my precious money and left. I went straight back to the base, put on a hoody to cover my head and went to seek out the YWAM hairdresser. It was embarrassing because I had not gone to her in the first place but I was desperate. 

She graciously cut the top of my hair very short to try to even it out. But the bottom was so short and the other hairdresser had buzzed an actual line around the middle of my head to separate the top from the bottom. So now I had really, really short hair with a line around the middle. Fortunately, it grew quickly but I had learned my lesson.

My bearded "terrorist" look


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