TANGLED

Tangled

I recently had a run in with my oldest daughter. We were camping and she didn’t want to brush her waist length, thick hair out in the morning. “It’s in a bun Mom. We’re camping. It’s not going to get tangled.” All the warning signs were there. The hair at the base of her neck had become gnarled into an object resembling a Brillo Pad. I could not see the hair tie holding the mass together. I started to dig my heels in.  She had to let me help her fix it before it got worse. My dear husband, sensing the tension in the air told me to back off and let her make her own decision. If it ended badly, she would listen next time.  I slyly shook my head in agreement, looked her in the eye hoping for some sort of compliance, and gave up.  

The next morning as we prepared to go out exploring, I looked at her and told her she had to unwind her hair. It had to be brushed and put up again. She skulked away and a few moments later I found her unable to even pull the hair tie out. After 30 minutes of pulling, brushing, untying, and even trimming, we arrived at tangle free hair. The sacrifice: the shedding of painful tears, some patience lost, and a pile of matted hair on the floor.

As I was making sense of her hair, I couldn’t help but think about how tangles are like mistakes. If we make one and we view it as something we can fix later, it can become a bigger problem. Every day that we put off fixing our mistakes or problems they continue to thread their eager fingers through the parts of our life that aren’t tangled yet.  As more time passes by they become more gnarled and matted. We come to the point where we can’t untangle them without help. A point where we want to feel good again and not burdened by a strangle hold with a problem that started with one mistake.  A point where we just about lose a part of ourselves just so that we can feel whole again.

So how do we avoid getting to that point? How do we take our mistakes by the horn and push our lives in the right direction? Well, for one we can stop ignoring our tangles today.  Something as simple as a lie, an unkind word aimed at a cherished friend, some jealousy, one too many beers, taking too much medication, ignoring your need for self-care, spending too much money, investing in unhealthy relationships. The mistakes are endless. The holy ghost tries to warn us away from these mistakes all the time. It sees what we can’t. It can see the knot that will turn into a Brillo Pad in our lives. Abrasive, harmful, and destructive. It whispers to us to fix it now, but we don’t want to listen.

 We tell ourselves, “This is fun. It feels good, so it can’t be bad. I don’t have time to deal with this.  I will just do it this one time. I’ll just do it one more time. I can handle this on my own. This isn’t really a big deal. No one knows I do this but me.  They love me anyway. They don’t know. I don’t want to bother them with this. I am in control.”

Here’s the beauty of the atonement of Jesus Christ. All those tangles big and large, it can handle them. The mistakes we made for the first time today, and the mistakes that have eroded into decades of our lives.  The atonement can handle them all. It shows us that we are not alone. That we are never too far from his love and forgiveness. No matter how messy, impossible, hard, or ingrained it is in who we are.  If we reach out to him, he will lead us to the right people and the right places. We will find his hands here on earth. His hands are found in the minds and bodies of people who can help heal our minds and hearts. They can knock some sense into us. Strangers who can see us for what we really are, and friends who will hold us up when we can’t remember who we are. These people and the Savior are with us until we can hold ourselves up – tangle free.  We just need to look up, listen, be willing to go through some pain, and let him and his hands do their work.  

Unknotting the tangles in our lives is hard, and we might need to cut away some things that feel like they are a part of us. In the end though, it can all be done through the love and sacrifice of Jesus Christ. Through him and our own efforts, we can be made whole again. I am sure Christ must feel a lot like I did that morning looking at that little tangle in my daughters hair. He has probably looked at my life sometimes and just said, “Let me help you fix that before it becomes to big for you to handle.” Then when I didn’t reach out to him, he would look at me knowing what would happen and say with a little sorrow, “I will still be here to help you when you ask.” A few months and sometime years later he would state, “I am here. This won’t be easy, but I will help you become untangled.”

So, take inventory of your tangles. Reach out and let him help you brush them away.