Thank you?

The memory of my mother wielding the infamous pink wide-toothed comb on Saturday evenings still has the power to make me cringe. She'd set me down sideways on one of our yellow kitchen chairs, undo my damp terrycloth turban, and more often than not advise me of the necessity of this ritual and the futility of tears. "No crying, please--it doesn't help, and it only stresses me out. If you didn't get so many tangles, it wouldn't hurt so bad. Now let's just get this over with...and think how pretty your hair will be for church tomorrow!" Then she'd set to the task with ruthless, root-ravaging zeal, the pain so immediate and potent that I never suffered in silence for long.

From my perch in a future unclouded by the threat of that terrible comb I can see the humor in the situation, and even muster some empathy for the woman who faced the same thankless earpslitting ordeal with all of her young daughters each Saturday twilight. I can appreciate the devotion that inhabited her deed, the commitment to keeping us clean and beautiful, and see in it a motive akin to that which impelled her to launder our clothes and tidy our house and feed us beautifully crafted meals (oh, the scent of freshbaked bread on Monday afternoons!).

Only recently have I come to see how even in dragging that comb through my damp snarled locks, my mother was imaging, however feebly, her Creator.

At the end of time, when God takes the Truth like a comb to a world shampooed of evil, untangling however painfully all the lies that knot and disfigure it, His motive will be the truer, purer version of my mother's, and His results will be improvement far beyond the imagination of a world that has grown accustomed (as I did each week) to its own matted 'do.

Ridiculous analogy? Of course. But I have a feeling that even our most glorious metaphors will sound equally infantile when we see them enacted at last.

In closing, I think it appropriate that I credit my mother for imparting to me the compulsion to allegorize, however foolishly, every life experience.