Month: June 2018

I SMELLED YOUR COLOGNE AGAIN TODAY FOR THE TENTH TIME, AND CRIED.

~ Pat Vick ~ 7 Comments

I smelled your cologne today, as I do at this time every year. I only take your shaving kit out once a year. It’s just the way you left it. Manicure kit, razor, bottle of prescription medication, a ziplock bag of discolored granules -perhaps epsom salt, and your cologne. I wouldn’t dare spray it. I can’t imagine the fragrance on anything or anyone but you. Ten years; ten sniffs.

I draw the smell in, and I am hugging you again. Ferociously. I am enveloped in your arms and plaid shirt. It’s always plaid. Even though you wore suits and dress casual attire so often, you liked to think of yourself as a rugged kind of guy. To be held in your arms again, if only in my imagination, is a delight. I notice your shoulders and arms are more sinew rather than the bulk they use to be. I think you’ve decided to get healthy in your mature years.

For a moment, my face is against your chest, feeling your heartbeat and the reverberation of your voice as you say, “Hey, Patty!” You were the only one who called me that, one of my many aliases, the evidence of being adopted at seven. There was no one nickname that stuck. Everyone just came up with one of their own for me. You called me Patty, or Sister, which you called both of us girls. When you said Patty, it had a softness to it, like a caress. I wish I could hear you say it again. I’m so thankful that I can still remember the exact way your voice sounded.

My mind drifts back through the years, picking up the special memories, and leaving the rest. Sifting the wheat, and gifting the chaff to the wind. Click To Tweet

Remember when I was in junior high, and our class took a trip to the Capitol? You asked if a friend and I could go back to your office with you, separate from the group. I admit I loved the looks of admiration. I was a Princess for the day. Remember how I asked you to pose for a picture like you were taking a business call?

Remember when you took us yard selling and ran out of gas? Always pushing it to the very last thimbleful. That must be where I get it from. We had to coast down the hill, through an intersection, into the gas station.

Remember when Logan went to his first prom? I called you and told you, and you said, “And Mama’s a little sad,” and I cried. You knew exactly what I was feeling. There were two more proms that you never got to comfort me through. They were so handsome and beautiful. You would have been so proud. Your oldest grandson has made me a Memaw three times over. Three boys. Can you believe it? I wish you could bury your face in their bellies and smell their fragrance, just like I’m smelling yours.

Remember when you showed up at the office out of the blue? I didn’t even know you were in town. You took me out to eat, and bought me a milkshake. You reminisced about your days as a boy, seeming puzzled at where all the years had gone. You said, “I still feel like that little boy inside.”

You memorialized the dogs that you had loved as a boy, and talked about the one you had at the time, a schnauzer named Hercules. You said, “He’s the best dog I’ve ever had. I don’t know what I’d do if I lost that dog…I’m tired of losing people I love.” I knew it was more about the people than the dogs. Thank you for letting me glimpse your heart that day. I wish I had the time back to share with you the dogs…and people that I’ve loved and lost.

I should have known that day that something was amiss. You were always just so larger than life. I couldn’t see you any other way. Tough as nails. Invincible. Frank P.

Remember when I called, and you seemed distracted. You finally had to confess that you were at the hospital having a blood transfusion.

…A blood transfusion…

Suddenly, you were mortal, after all. Then it was a blur. Calling the siblings, and asking if they knew. No. You had decided to walk this path alone. Why do people think that’s best for everyone? We had hardly any time at all to say goodbye. To say, “Thank you,  I love you,” or “How dare you?”

Hospice came.

Family came.

People I didn’t know came.

Death came.

We did have that one last special moment, ten years ago today. While breathing in the last breath you ever breathed out, I held your hand as you crossed over.

I smelled your cologne again today for the tenth time, and cried.

Senator Frank P. Lashlee June 30, 1937 – June 18, 2008

Warm Regards, -Pat

As always, please feel free to leave a comment, share to social media, email me: PAT@PATVICK.COM and SUBSCRIBE to my newsletter.

INVITATION TO SHARE

-How do you choose to remember loved ones who have passed away?

-Have you been successful at “sifting the wheat, and gifting the chaff to the wind” from relationships with deceased loved ones?

-What does this phrase mean to you?

Why I Haven’t Cut My Hair In Over a Quarter of a Century

~ Pat Vick ~ Leave a comment

As a junior in high school, I had never been introduced to teaching on the New Birth, Holiness, nor the doctrine of Uncut Hair for women. At that time, my hair wasn’t uncut, but it was considered long, hanging all one length, a third of the way down my back, with the exception of “fly back” bangs.

Even though I had worn my hair like this for years, immediately after visiting a Oneness Pentecostal Church for the first time, I had the notion to get my hair cut. Suddenly, I wanted a new look.

I remember sitting in the salon chair after I told the stylist how I wanted it cut with her looking at me in hesitation. She told me how pretty my hair was and tried to talk me out of cutting it off. I continued to encourage her to do her job. She stood with the scissors open against my hair and literally begged me, “Please don’t make me cut your hair.”

I remember the metallic shearing of the scissors as they came together, the dull tug of severing, followed by the slight spring back of blunted ends. Even though I would have never let the stylist know it, something happened in the spiritual realm at that moment. I would not have been able to understand it or explain it at the time even if I had tried, but I can tell you with certainty that something was taken from me in that chair. I felt it leave me just as surely as if it had been spilled out onto the ground.

When I stood up I saw a sight that is permanently etched into my memory. Layers of long, golden hair discarded in a full circle around the now empty chair. I paid for the cut, ran my hands through my now short layers of hair, and plastered on a confident smile as I walked out the door with a heaviness in my heart.

Another incident happened several years later, after I had experienced the New Birth. After being born again, I was eager to embark on a journey of discipleship. I enthusiastically embraced a life of Holiness and spiritual disciplines. When I read and understood the topic of women’s uncut hair in 1 Corinthians 11, I stopped cutting my hair.

It was during this time that a friend from my childhood was passing through and came to stay with us for a week or so. She wore her hair in a very short wedge cut, with the crown of her head a bit longer, gradually getting shorter to the nape of her neck, which she kept shaved.

One day in passing conversation, she commented that she hadn’t been able to get to the hair salon for a while, and the hair on the back of her neck had grown out longer than she liked. Would I mind shaving it for her? Now, mind you, I was completely sold out to the doctrine of women’s uncut hair, and had not cut my own hair in any way for several years at this point. Without even thinking, however, but just trying to be a help, I replied, “Sure.”

It was at that very moment that a searing pain shot through my chest, as if a hot firebrand had been plunged into my heart. I have never felt that kind of pain before nor after, and thankfully, it only lasted a split second. That was all it took to bring me to myself. It was only then that I realized what I had agreed to do, and that it had displeased the Lord.

I turned to her and said, “I am so sorry. I know that I told you I would, but I don’t cut my hair and I can’t cut yours.” Her response was understandable from someone who had never been taught 1 Corinthians 11, “Oh, I’m not wanting you to cut it! I just want you to shave the stubble at the bottom.” But I knew that stubble, if let grow, would be long hair. Beside that, I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that it would be displeasing to the Lord. Again, I told her that I couldn’t do to her hair what the Word of God and my strong conviction restricted me from doing to my own.

I shared with her as much of 1 Corinthians 11 as she was able to receive at that time, but knew that the experience was more for me than her. In His mercy, God had a hair stylist try to talk me out of cutting my hair years before. He, also mercifully sent me a piercing reminder when He knew I had agreed to something in thoughtless haste.

So, just as the title of this articles claims, I haven’t cut my hair in over a quarter of a century, and have no plans to ever cut it. To the world, this may seem like a strange notion, and terribly lacking in any fashion sense. To me, and according to 1 Corinthians 11, my uncut hair is my GLORY, the SYMBOL OF SUBMISSION to spiritual authority, and my SOURCE OF POWER with the angelic host.

*Please see the ACCOMPANYING VIDEO on 1 Corinthians 11:1-16, the biblical teaching of the Doctrine of Uncut Hair as a symbol of submission to spiritual authority.

Your feedback is welcome.

Warm Regards, -Pat Vick