New Year, Tenth Step

I have a new hole in my head: in my mouth to be exact. It was put there yesterday by a very gentle dentist. I went in to my appointment expecting to have a root canal performed, and came out with an extraction. It was not a hard choice, really. The dentist explained to me that it would most likely require extensive work to save the tooth, with an unfavorable prognosis that it could be saved long-term. I am not much of a gambler; I had no desire to throw good money after bad teeth, and I was not very keen on that possibility. I thought it made the best sense to handle a little bit of pain now in exchange for no worries later.

As I sat down to write this morning, I realized that a number of analogies could be drawn from yesterday’s experience; however, most of them struck me as contrived, albeit true. I mulled them over a few minutes longer before deciding to touch briefly on one aspect of dental visits in general. Specific dentist chair reflections are for another day.

I love my dentist, and most importantly, I trust her. When I was going in for my first root canal, I paid scant attention to the horror stories people felt a need to recount—perhaps thinking they were doing me a kindness in preparation for the procedure? As it turned out, for me to have anticipated the dreaded pain as predicted, would have been a colossal waste of time; the root canal was painless.

What was my take away from the experience—besides a definite improvement in my dental health?  Given my complete lack of dental knowledge and expertise, it would have been foolhardy for me to try to second guess the doctor or attempt to tell her how to do her job. Neither would it have profited me to insist that she perform an unnecessary or unbeneficial, perhaps even harmful, procedure simply because I had it in my head that was what I wanted to be done. With relative ease, we can draw spiritual parallels to how we approach our relationship with God.

God is God and I am not. As I continue stepping through this new year, I want to live my life more deliberately and earnestly in light of this perspective. I am depending on the living and active Word of God to provide back-up.  “And we have such trust through Christ toward God. Not that we are sufficient of ourselves to think of anything as being from ourselves, but our sufficiency is from God…”  (2 Cor. 1:23) “But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellence of the power may be of God and not us. “(2 Cor. 4: 7)   As concerns the affairs of this life, and specifically those of this year, I see the winning-est strategy  in 2012 being to settle it early on that I am God’s problem and let it go at that; I trust He is more than up to the challenge.