Dollar for a tooth

Ongkingco

Aclose friend shared a story about her son. When he lost his front tooth, they told him that he could keep it under his pillow.
“Why?”

“So the tooth fairy can come and get it,” they explained.

“Then what?”

“She will exchange it with a gift!”

Her son excitedly did everything they said. He even washed the tooth and kept it inside a little paper pouch and wrote: ‘For the tooth fairy!’

The next day he rushed into the dining room holding a pouch.

“The tooth fairy came! The tooth fairy came!”

“What did she give you, honey!” His mother winked at her husband.

“I don’t know, I haven’t opened it yet,” he peered into the pouch.

“So, what’s inside?”

“A dollar!!!?”

“Are you happy?”

“Yes, but where can I go to buy a new tooth?”

My friend wrote: ‘We literally ROLFed!’

I asked her what it meant and she said: Rolling On the Floor Laughing.

* * *

This story reminded me about the following sayings: “There are things that money cannot buy!” or “Money, can’t buy everything!”

Sometimes it’s easy to forget that there are some priceless things that only pass us only once in life: our families, parents, siblings, friends, etc.

Then there are important life ingredients that help us to live life better: the virtues and our God-given talents.

Finally, there are the memories that we live by every day, that we treasure forever.

We often miss out on them because of our materialistic and consumerist world.

Very often, people, things and events are valued more by how they can be quantified or weighed. And when they can no longer meet our selfish expectations, we dispose of them.

Like the boy in the anecdote, even if we may be given a dollar in exchange for a tooth, there is nothing that would give us back a real tooth.

We daily see this trend happening in our lives as flashy gadgets, social media and a ‘touristic’ outlook of life and world tend to replace or blur life’s priceless people and moments.

These cannot be capture on a selfie or a video, it cannot be worded out easily on a blog nor can it be shared over social media.

There are some things that we cannot simply replace or rewind, because they are best treasured and cherished personally.

It may be good at every day’s end, not only to thank God for our blessings.

But to also write down a few of them in some form of diary. And then as we go over them, with God’s light and grace, to ask ourselves how we have treasured them a little more each day.