Life Lessons from the Dentist:

I have recently had to go to the dentist a lot.  I have not had the best year when it comes to getting cavities, so it has not necessarily been the highlight of the year.  I don’t particularly like going and getting numb, having a bad taste in my mouth (literally), and people stuffing my face with appliances.  I don’t know a lot of people who necessarily love this sensation. Sometimes it would be easier to think about not going to the dentist and just ignoring my cavities, or leave it for a longer amount of time.  

However, there is a really important reason for why we need to go to the dentist.  We can get really ill if we leave the cavities in our mouths.  It is decay and infection in our mouth that eventually can lead to large amounts of pain as well as decay going to other parts of our body.  So therefore, I went to the dentist, received a shot of numbing solution, continuous drilling on my tooth, and had a new filling put in.  Now I don’t have that decay in my body, and my teeth will no longer hurt.  Even though going to the dentist isn’t necessarily fun, I now am significantly healthier than I was before.  

This made me realize a few things.  Sometimes we have to have something taken out of our lives.  There are some things that are toxic and not good for our overall health, whether this health be emotional, physical, or of course our relational health with God and others.  This could be a sin, a shame that we are trying to hide or even another relationship that is taking us farther away from God.  This could be something we are putting in place of God as a god in our lives.  None of these items are good, and yet sometimes they creep into our lives and become so a part of them, that we don’t want to let them go.  

Going to the dentist can be painful and invasive.  Your teeth are strong and hard (which is a good thing, so we can use them to eat food), so to have to take out something in those teeth, we need to have a tool drilling and grinding out the toxics on something incredibly hard.  Before people become Chrisitans, we have a hard heart filled with a lot of sin and hatred from the world.  But God goes in and starts to work on that hard heart.  Sometimes this is through hard realizations.  Some of these hard realizations are that we are imperfect, we have been born with sin, and we can not depend on ourselves to get to heaven.  That is hard to hear and to comprehend.  There are positives coming up that I am going to mention, but this is similar to the pain of drilling on teeth at the dentist.  

The good news is that there is a numbing solution.  Now, I don’t particularly like getting numb.  I don’t like that it feels tingly for hours on end after I leave the dentist.  I don’t like eating the first full meal while my mouth still is partially numb.  It always feels a bit strange.  However, I would not prefer going through the drilling on bone in my mouth without being numbed.  Can you imagine?  That would be so much worse. Even though I don’t like being numbed, I would much rather have that over anything else.  This reminds me that God helps us when it comes to removing these sins and toxins in our lives.  It is not that he will allow no pain because we will have pain in this world, but he will always be present.  He will be the numbing component to whatever trial or tribulation we are experiencing.  The Lord, unlike any human person, never leaves our sides.  He is a God of peace, a God of grace, and a God of love.  All of these items are items that he will provide to us throughout any circumstance.  

Then there is the filling.  God replaces whatever was taken out with something even better.  Ephesians 36:26 says, “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.”  When we become Christians, we get a whole heart.  This heart is not hard, but it is filled with grace and everlasting love.  Again, I will not say that there is no pain in having a heart taken out of your body, but it is worth so much more than leaving the hardened heart.  When we have that brand new heart, sealed with God’s love put in, we will feel brand new.  

This shows that God can use any experience to remind you of his love.  Because sin entered the world, there is a worldly heart each one of us was created with.  Through his love and his sacrifice on the cross, we can be given a new heart that is lighter and even more Christ-like.  This can be hard and painful, but the Lord will be with his people every step of the way.  This is just like a dentist drilling out the decay in our teeth, replacing it with a filling that is clean and durable, all the while being numbed from the excruciating pain of a drill.  The world is full of God’s love.  My challenge for you this week is to, like me, find an ordinary experience and see how you can see God’s love shown through it.