1,500 Root canal and crown
-400 for having approved insurance
-763 Insurance coverage
I slapped down new plastic before the secretary could say: "$337.00 Dollars please." It was a new one, I called to activate it earlier that day. I still haven't signed the back. Honestly I'm embarrassed that I got a credit card for my copayment.
Two weeks of poping Advil and enduring spiking pain lead to a painful three hours in a chair, jaw opened with a doorstop looking thing and a Dentist drilling to the root of the matter. Somewhere between the novocane and the late afternoon appointment, as my dentist talked to her assistant about loosing loved ones in amusement parks, I called out to God. It's not that I couldn't handle the remainder of the pain, but God allows me to be in a state of prayer no matter the endeavor. There's doubt that my dentist was focusing on me, there's consequences to paying with a credit card, and so I prayed about this. Since I didn't know when the pain would jolt my nerve, I just focused on the dentistry in Jesus' time and the affliction they had to endure since modern science was closer to cave man tactics back then.
The kicker is this: once drilled to the end of the tooth-root, the dentist grabs these long two inch spikes and files the hole until its clean enough and deep enough for the warm gooey filling. To confirm proper workmanship, we took an x-ray with one of these spikes sticking half in/half out of my tooth. As the hours carried on I grew more tense and wrestless. But I insisted that Christ knew my pain and what I was going through though never shot with novocane. My prayers started sounding circular: "It'll be great to eat without pain again, thanks God. I can't imagine what the billions of people in the world do when they are in tooth pain with no dentist. Ouch that hurt, Send your Holy Spirit to heal and blanket this pain, you have the healing power God I need this. Help me endure this really needs to be a lesson for me." -Something similar to that over and over. The dental lesson was: rinse with a fluride mouth wash, brush twice and floss daily. Until death!
God's lesson came back on the X-ray. The point of the spike was like an inch inside me. All the pain, squirming. complaining stopped long enough for me to imagine the crown of thorns. An object of the crucifixion I forget or never really gave much thought to. Until that day at the dentist looking at that single spike (versus the many on the crown of Christ). I remember being told that rose branches in that region have really long thorns. So Jesus' brain which is the center for all the nerves, harbored needle-like thorns brutly placed.
I'm not trying to embellish the pain tolerance of Christ or His spiritual centeredness to have endured such pain. -One glimpse of this in my heart made me see how I needed a wambulance and quiet refuge in God because Jesus suffered and died for me. Jesus Christ chose to dwell in pain for the completion of God the Fathers' promises to me. What an act of faith to count on an unjustly tortured man to bear what I deserve: until death. And my, what a laughable fraction of suffering/panic it took in a dentist chair to wonder: how did Christ hang on! May I have the willingness to share what Christ painfully endured to remove God's wrath from us and all. The crown of thorns is the only crown my Savior carries until my death which brings me to Him.
