Trip to the Dentist

Going to the dentist is never a fun experience.  But it gets even worse when you have a couple thousand dollars worth of work to do on your mouth.  As I was sitting in the chair, hearing the whizzing drill and feeling water shoot through my mouth, I was thinking.  (Thinking is what I had to do since Novocain doesn’t work very well on me.)  Sometimes our lives are like teeth.  We try our hardest to maintain it by ourselves.  We clean it and polish it.  We get it cleaned at church and ultimately, if we maintain it properly, there are no problems. 

Inevitably though, we get a cavity.  YIKES!  Something that is causing our life to decay.  Something that is eating away at the good strong tooth.  With our teeth, we dread the words, “you need a filling” like it is someone telling us that we have to eat straight vinegar.  Finally, when you go to get that filling done, you get laid back in the chair and a needle is brought to your mouth and you feel pinching and moving near where the cavity is.  Fortunately, the dentist has decided to numb you first.  He sits there for a little while and waits for the Novocain to start working and your mouth starts feeling fat and silly.  Then you hear it.  The drill starts to buzz and the water starts to move around and choke you in the back of your mouth.  If the Novocain is working, then you don’t really feel too much, you feel a little pressure here and there, and it isn’t comfortable.  If the Novocain doesn’t work (like it doesn’t for me) you feel some sharp pains as they hit specific nerves and spots on your teeth. Ultimately though ,you will end up leaving with a fresh new start.  A new tooth that is problem free.

So how is that like life?  Well…  We could be going through life all good- like we don’t need help, we are doing fine on our own.  We don’t realize that there is a cavity growing and eating away inside our life.  For me, wint-o-green lifesavers were my down fall in high school.  I would eat about 3 packs of them a day.  I could go through a pack in a half hour.  They were just THAT good.  Unfortunately, that bad habit turned my teeth into cavity central and I had 8 cavities in result of those.  We might be indulging in something that we really like in life.  We don’t see it eating away at our life.  We don’t see the hole growing under the surface and since it is under the surface, we don’t feel it.  When we finally go to God and say- examine me, he says, well- you have a cavity and you need a filling.  That space needs to be cleaned out and filled with my love, my grace, my hope, with ME. If we go to God on a consistent basis, we won’t be needing all that much work done, it is when we don’t go for a while and really stray away from the things God tells us to do.  (the dentist tells us to stay away from sugar, brush etc…)

It isn’t always a comfortable process when we let God work on the cavity spots in our lives.  A lot of times, it isn’t comfortable at all.  We might not be all the way numb to it.  But in the end, we know that this is the best thing that we can do because ultimately, our teeth (life) is very important and we need our teeth for important functions.  We need to have good teeth to be good examples for our children. 

2 Corinthians 5:17 says, “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!”  Are we going to let God come in and fix the cavities that have formed in our lives?  Are we to the point of needing something more serious like a crown or a root canal?  We need to commit to letting God in and letting him work on our lives and just trust that he is doing the right thing.  He is the professional, we aren’t!