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The following blog was written by Renee Dugan, a full-time staff member with Spirit & Truth Fellowship Int’l.

Before wireless headphones really became a staple on the audio market, people had no choice but to listen to music with corded headphones tethering them to their musical devices. Many a cellphone and MP3 player saw its bitter, cracked-screen demise at the end of a hapless fall—as the listener stepped away from the device too quickly, or the headphones got hung up on something, or the tug of the cords pulled the player off of its safe resting place.

One thing that every corded-headphone user knows and hates it just how notorious these little things are for getting hopelessly tangled while in one’s purse, pocket, or backpack. The internet abounds with comics poking fun at how you can tuck away your headphones, perfectly wrapped and tied off…only to pull them out looking like Medusa’s snarling dreadlocks on a bad hair day.

I’m not immune to this condition, myself…in fact, it’s a running joke between my husband and me. When we were still just engaged, he came up to me one day in a fit of laughter. He’d cut out a comic panel of a little girl sitting in her bed, holding a pair of perfectly disentangled corded headphones as she triumphantly declared, “Hooray! The headphone fairy fixed my headphones last night!”—and he’d written my name across the girl’s shirt.

Years later, I still laugh at this comic every time I see it hanging on our fridge; but sometimes I feel it says a lot more about me than just my propensity for snarled headphones. In truth, my life’s a lot like a headphone cord; whenever I think I’ve got everything perfectly wrapped up and neatly tucked where it belongs, that’s usually when the little things are entwining hopelessly under the surface. When I look at them again, I find they really weren’t as perfect, fixed, or healed as I thought they were.

At that point, more often than not, I come to grips with the fact that I don’t stand a chance of getting things unknotted on my own…at least, not without running the risk of seriously damaging my inner wiring. So then I’ve gotta remind myself that I have a headphone fairy—actually, my Heavenly Father—who excels at unknotting the messes…even the ones I make by pretending everything’s cool and I’ve got it under control. Rather than trying and failing to keep these struggles, personal issues, and weaknesses from getting tangled—over and over again—what I need to do is bring them to the Great Detangler for real help.

If you’re struggling with some knotted cords that keep getting matted up no matter how many times you’ve tried to smooth them out, I deeply encourage you to take your problems to the Great Detangler, too. His methods really allow us to get those knots out…and in a way that prevents them from ever getting tangled again.

Most of us would be overjoyed to have that solution for our headphone cords…why not with all of our personal problems, too?