For a number of years I was a dental assistant by profession, and yes, now I often fall into bed at night, completely spent wondering, “Did I even brush my teeth at all today?”.  I learned many valuable life lessons while working in this field.

Lessons like:
If you put a can of Pepsi in the freezer in hopes of it getting cold fast, but you forget it’s in there, it will explode. Thus reminding you that you put it in the freezer. Of course everyone else in the office will be ducking and running for cover, sure that someone just took a shot at them. You will also get the wonderful job of cleaning out the refrigerator and freezer. In which you will find your lunch from last month. The lunch you were so sure someone stole because you just put it there and now it’s gone, thereby necessitating the need to for a run to Big-T for a greasy burger. Because it would be too easy to just tell your office mates you’re in desperate need of an oil change so you hide your lunch. Sigh.

Spraying someone with the air/water syringe is fun. And it’s an easy way to have a water fight. But we *never* did that.  Or okay maybe there was that one time…but certainly not more than once…or twice or okay every day.

I also learned about communication. I recall a staff meeting one day. The dentist shared a cartoon he thought was funny and applicable to the whole staff.  The picture was of a man and his wife, and the caption read:
We don’t have a communication problem. We don’t communicate, no problem.

I think “communication” was the buzzword for the 80s. But it is true. Communication is vital to our very survival. And we need to communicate in a way others understand. Unlike this woman:
A wife asks her husband, “Could you please go shopping for me and buy one carton of milk and if they have avocados, get six.

A short time later the husband comes back with six cartons of milk.

The wife asks him, “Why did you buy six cartons of milk?”

He replied, “They had avocados.”

I’ve recently come face-to-face with the whole communication, or lack thereof issue again. You see I am in charge of our church’s facebook page. I failed to communicate to the leadership (my fault!) that facebook had changed things and now if we wanted to reach the same number of people we had been reaching, even people who “liked” our page, we would need to promote it. Or in other words, we would have to now pay to do what we had been doing for free.

It didn’t seem like a good idea to me so I had tapered off the page. But that is only part of the reason. I also was somewhat out of the loop on happenings. It’s one thing to be in the office and in the midst of everything going on and being out of the office and having no idea what is really going on.

Our pastor emailed me some questions about our facebook page and I shared with him exactly what I shared above. I used the example of being asked if there was going to be a Christmas Eve service this year and how I hadn’t heard there would be one but I did hear one man share with another that he was in charge of the worship.

It’s really hard to communicate when you have no idea what you’re supposed to communicate. So now I’m back to looking for ways to communicate our church life to those who like our page.

Now if only I can get the leadership to communicate with me….