The Tooth Fairy

I recently got a text from my daughter that included a picture of the "princess", my granddaughter who had proudly just lost her first tooth.  When I was a kid, that was a really big deal.  It was almost like a rite of passage.  And it meant that the tooth fairy would pay a visit to my bedroom that night if I left the tooth under my pillow.  I would wake up in the morning full of anticipation because I had been told that if I left that tooth under the pillow the tooth fairy would come during the night while I was sleeping and take the tooth and leave something there for me.  It was always a quarter...a whole quarter that was my very own.

Later on that day, my daughter again texted me to tell me she was all excited....she had found her tooth fairy pillow....a special pillow made for her by her grammy when she was but a wee girl, and that she was passing it on to the princess.  Then she made the comment "It's amazing the junk I have held on to."  (Being the sentimentalist that she is, she has kept a ton of "stuff" from her childhood years....stuff that has now become generational treasures).

I texted her back and shared that this is good "junk"....healthy "junk".  This kind of "junk" is good for the family.  It provides wonderfully warm and fuzzy bonding, memories, connections.  It isn't harmful "junk".

Unfortunately, many of us also hang on to other junk.  Like our pasts.  Like bad memories.  Like our mistakes.  Like grudges.  Like anger.  And the list goes on and on.  That kind of junk is cancerous, because if allowed it metastasizes within us and the outcome is a bitter, unhappy person....one who often is relationally challenged.  One who can only have a tenuous relationship with God.

There is no tooth fairy pillow in the stuff we have saved from our childhood that we can put that kind of junk under and magically have it transformed.  Most of the self-help programs have a concise and clear message they lean on to deal with that kind of junk.  "Turn it over and let it go".  While not always easy, it is, if nothing else, quite succinct.  Developing and maintaining a relationship with Christ is the single most successful way to "turn it over and let it go".  He is not a tooth fairy, but when we put our junk under the pillow He does give us a new life and a new way to live it.