I'm just musing. Maybe I want to tell a story. Maybe I don't really want to go into the details of it. Maybe I just want to walk around it today.
I woke up today feeling the weight of the world. My circumstances, our circumstances, the human condition. Shame and mistrust and helplessness and lack. Death and desire for death, a spark of life and the hope for real life. All of this; where there is so much wrong, and me with a worry, outside of it as spectator, as commentator, as frowning architect, and I am wondering what to do with it all in the here and now. Today I am wondering, how to bring the something better to the here and now.
I have a stainless steel molar hiding in the back of my mouth. I’ve had opportunities to have it swapped out for a porcelain one, but I keep it as a trophy.
Why do I have it? When I was in Thailand, I dove into 4 inches of water. This is a story in itself, but I’ll answer the anticipated question of “Why the heck would you do that?” by saying simply that I was running full speed and diving into a shallow spot on a beach all day long that day, and at day's end, the tide went out before I dove in a last time.
I didn’t break my neck outright, or wasn’t knocked unconscious to drown in a faceful of dirty water. I have a supernormally hard head. The short version of this story before my story has me spitting out sand (rather, granules of teeth that had been smashed into sand) followed by a few restless days with dental nerves exposed to the elements, followed by the Appointment. Which is where the trophy story begins.
I remember a movie starring Dustin Hoffman called the Marathon Man. The title references Hoffman's character, an insulated university student and runner. His brother was mixed up with the mob or something and died trying to reach Hoffman, but without telling Hoffman his impossible secret about where Nazi gold was hidden or something, and suffer through the sequence where a Naziconcentrationcamptorturer gets Hoffman's character into his dental chair to determine if the brother told him where he'd hidden the gold. The questioning involves the dentist drilling holes gunbarrel straight into Hoffman's teeth, asking, "Is it safe?" Over and over.
Maybe I don't want to go into the details of my story.
I sometimes quote-in-paraphrase Graham Cooke, who famously says “If we are in Christ, then all of our circumstances are in Christ too” and everyone takes great comfort in that. Because Jesus cares about our crappé.
Since I'm not my circumstances, I really want to be divorced from them. We three - circumstances and Christ and me are all stuck in this bubble together. If I push the stuff over *there* onto Jesus, and at the same time seek a closeness with Him, well, we're all three still atop each other, aren't we?
My four inches of water was off the beaten path, so after three days of pressing my tongue against my teeths' rootshards to keep the air off of the nerves, I was in Bangkok for the Appointment to see a dentist at the hospital. I should have considered what manner of dentist works out of a hospital, rather than in private practice. I should have gone anywhere else. I should have eaten a bottle of aspirin before the Appointment, but I didn't do any of those things.
From the street, Thai buildings with air conditioning are evident by condensation on the windows; so cold inside that water is running down the glass on the outside, like an iced soda on a hot day. The hospital was this wet-windowed cold.
I wore shorts to the Appointment, and shivered as I sat back into a plastic-covered dentist chair. When I leave the chair a few hours later, I will leave a two-inch deep puddle of my sweat there and on the floor.
I am in Christ, and I will always be in Christ – safe in this bubble of grace, in this newcovenant that He made with the Father – a covenant that will continue after death into eternity. My fallen, temporal circumstances may be in this covenant now, but then, they won’t. I will outlive them. Fastforward, I won't have to consider them mine. They and all of their shittyass shortcomings will end at death. I will have no more mortgage, no more health issues, or money issues or marriage issues or children issues or work issues or ministry issues or time issues or fatigue issues or any circumstancial shortcomings in the circumstances this world offers. They will both end, this world and my circumstances in it.
But until then, I'm feeling the weight of all of it. I have a shadow of doubt that my circumstances are going to hold me down until I'm finally free of them. I will never be more in this world and life than this gravity, and I’ll suffer under, slogging along during what time I have left here to eventually die only as unrealized potential.
Here lies one who wanted more and finally got it, but not in the here and now and not before anyone else who didn't ever even desire more in here and now. More's the pity.
My dentist and I, only the two of us in this large linoleum room, used for surgeries, maybe. The dentist, grim and silent, mostly. Me, resolute and trained from youth to undergo any circumstance without complaint. The room doesn't have an anesthesiolgist. The cabinet doesn't have any painkillers. The side table has a stainless steel thimble, and a hooked silver pick, and a surgical dremel grinder.
I relive only the outline of the Appointment. Here we speed through sequences of the dentist pressing the steel onto my broken nerves, saying "No, no," inserting the hook under the steel to muscle it off and wildly igniting the fan of circuitry controlling pain reception throughout the left side of my body, the dentist alternately grinding on the steel and grinding on what is left of my teeth with high-pitched screams from the grinder and chalky smoke fogging from my mouth. And another sequence of another pressing down of the steel onto my nerves. Each time the thimble presses on and pulls off of the nerves with more tenacity, grabbing more tightly and stabbing more deeply with amplified jolts of naked agony.
Each time the dentist turns away to grind on the steel, I am asking myself, am I insane, is this really happening, am I at my mental limit, and answering myself with, "If you're asking questions, then you haven't reached your limit, and you really can go farther, can't you?" And then another round of farther in this marathon session.
At last the dentist pulls on the hook as hard as he can and the steel holds to the nerve, and I am released to exit the room, leaving my sweat and keeping my steel trophy.
I've used that Appointment as a benchmark many times, when I was hurting. Whatever it was I was going through, it was nothing much compared to that - and I survived that. Like a trauma victim, I guess I could go back to that memory and imagine Jesus in the room. He would be there, feeling my pain with me. I've no need to do this mental exercise. I wasn't blaming Him or feeling that He had abandoned me. I made it through, I can handle anything now.
Today I'm merely wondering. The happy ending to any story like this might only be that the story has an ending. Such is our hope with our wider life circumstances, that they end someday? That we leave them behind, eventually, like leaving a torture chamber? How different is Christ and me and circumstances caught here in this life, from Christ and me and the dentist? When does the teeth pulling end? I wonder if I should hope for more than simply an end to it. If I can wonder, if I am standing outside of the pain as a questioning Other, then I know I can both endure it further, and know that there is something better.
Today I am wondering, how to bring the something better to the here and now, before the too late. Being fully alive now. Being more than sweaty and suffering and broken now.
Why are you in despair, O my soul?
And why have you become disturbed within me?
Hope in God, for I shall again praise Him
For the help of His presence.
