Last summer, my kids and I went to Texas.  I grew up there; and took full advantage of the chance to meet with as many of my friends as I could while we were there.  At lunch one day with my sweet friend Amy, I bit into a fish taco and felt part of one of my back teeth break off.  Funny enough, it didn’t hurt one little bit.  Not at all.  When we returned home from our trip life moved right into the busy fall schedule.  School started – Halloween came and went – Christmas and New Year fun – birthdays – then we started packing to move to a new place.  My tooth was all but forgotten.  Until two weeks ago.

I woke up one morning and thought someone had taken a baseball bat to my jaw while I slept.  I have n-e-v-e-r felt pain like that in my life.  A bunch of Advil  made the pain go away.  Then it came back.  Worse.  More drugs.  48 hours later I was sitting in the dentist office listening to a kind woman tell me I needed a root canal because the nerve attached to my broken tooth is infected.  So I made an appointment to get it done.

“Mrs. Parker,” she offered, “if you had come in right away when it happened, we could have fixed it easily without having to do the root canal.”

Fixing it when it happened would have spared me pain and significant expense.  Now there’s a concept.

Relationships function in a similar manner.  I knew something was wrong with my tooth…. but I ignored it.  I didn’t deal with it.  Often, we know when there has been a fracture in a relationship.  An unkind word spoken in a moment of tension.  Finding ourselves in an awkward situation.  We know when something has gone a bit askew.  If it isn’t too painful though, we may be able to ignore it.  Pretend nothing happened.  Go about our business and hope it doesn’t cause us pain.  Unfortunately, just like my tooth didn’t heal itself, relationships don’t often heal themselves either.

Something that was not such a big deal is now a very big deal.  The life lesson here is that taking steps towards mending, not ignoring, a problem is the only way to do life.  Often it begins with laying down some measure of our pride or sense of self-righteousness – even if you know that you are right! Often it might cause some discomfort – when it would be easier to do nothing. Often it means putting yourself out there and taking responsibility – when you could easily hide the problem. BUT…(and you know there’s a BUT…) things don’t go away.  The past two weeks have been all about managing my horrible tooth pain.  Believe me, at least once each day I want to rip my head off because it hurts so much.  Similarly, at some point in the future, a break in a relationship will come back and demand the attention that it should have received right away.

I go in for my root canal tomorrow morning.  I am not looking forward to it – but I am looking forward to the healing that will come afterward.  If you have to do some tough business with a relationship, focus not on the great pain of it all – but the healing that will surely come after.

Peace.

~kp