One day while in the shower I decided to read the directions on my shampoo bottle as any normal person would and I ended up having a good laugh at what it told me about the actual shampoo and also how to use it. Firstly it told me, “Enter a world of botanical bliss and unleash the power of your naturally beautiful hair. Embracing you like a meadow of fresh flowers…..will take your hair to a place it’s never been before

Firstly, if I already had naturally beautiful hair, why would I need shampoo? And for another brief moment I thought I was part of the X-men with mutant powers – being able to unleash the power of my naturally beautiful hair for the good of humanity and defeat the power of evil. Plus the fact the only place my hair has never been before is off my head and down the plughole and I’d very much like to keep it the way it is!

In the same fashion, the way people work in today’s world is to talk themselves up and make themselves look better than they really are. Just like the description on the shampoo. We do it at job interviews, we do it when we talk of our sporting abilities, our cooking abilities and sometimes with the marks we get in our exams. We have this daydream perspective of what we would like to be and then we have reality of who we really are. It’s like saying that life is going along with Plan B because Plan A is just a fantasy.

That’s why I love reading the bible and soaking myself in it. Because it keeps me grounded. It tells me about life like it really is. When Jesus says he is “the way, the truth and the life,” he means every bit of it. There’s no need to make life better than it is because we are told heaven will be totally out of this world. The bible tells us we are rebellious and we need saving from our sin. There is no need to glam up that fact is there? Let’s aim to keep life real and realise we do need to let Jesus embrace us and take us to a place we have never been before.

Moving on then to the directions, it says to “Massage into wet hair and indulge in the luxurious lather. Surrender to the intoxicating fragrance….”

The only thing we need to surrender to is not shampoo but Jesus. I have almost used up the whole bottle and not yet has it done anything it has claimed to do so far. Lucky I was not putting my faith in the description or the directions. But I do put my faith in God’s Word that it will do for me what it says when I surrender to Jesus as my Lord and saviour. Because that is what surrendering is isn’t it? It’s giving yourself over to something or someone totally and saying, I give up, I can’t do this myself, I need help. Surrender yourselves to Jesus.

The shampoo also wants to tell me,“Wildly Exciting is our normal.” And I think that describes the Christian life pretty well when we find ourselves immersed in Jesus and surrendering our lives to him so we can have life to the full.