Wednesday, September 25, 2024
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Dental work
Give me neither poverty nor riches, but provide me only with the food I need, lest being full, I deny you and say “Who is the Lord?” Or being in want, I steal, and profane the name of my God.
In the dentist’s office I waited and talked with waiting patients, on their way in after Margaret came out. “In just a minute, we’ll be broke,” one of them said. Us too, and we looked at each other with smiling sympathy. Dentistry is expensive.
And sometimes without it, our teeth deteriorate or fall out, generally at least embarrassing us, often making eating miserable. Do you eat to live or live to eat? How your mouth feels matters.
This teeth thing is just the tip of the iceberg. At the end of Ecclesiastes Solomon paints old age dark …
Your arms will lose their strength. Your legs will become weak and bent. Your teeth will fall out, and you will not be able to chew your food. Your eyes will not see clearly. You will become hard of hearing. You will not hear the noise in the streets. Even the stone grinding your grain will seem quiet to you. You will not be able to hear the women singing. But then the sound of a bird singing will wake you early in the morning because you will not be able to sleep.
You will be afraid of high places. You will be afraid of tripping over every small thing in your path. Your hair will become white like the flowers on an almond tree. You will drag yourself along like a grasshopper when you walk. You will lose your desire, and then you will go to your eternal home. The mourners will gather in the streets as they carry your body to the grave.
Oh, boy. There’s a lot to watch out for. But it’s not like you can exactly avoid this stuff. Life happens. Solomon waxes poetic with lovely metaphors about the days left for him (or me, or you):
… before the silver cord is snapped, or the golden bowl is broken, or the pitcher is shattered at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern, and the dust returns to the earth as it was, and the spirit returns to God who gave it.
My new friend across the waiting room was nearly the same age as me. “Teeth and eyes, so much trouble with our teeth and eyes.” I spoke for a moment about the “gift of years,” and told her about the book. She looked quizzically at me.
Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher; all is vanity.
I began to think about our uniqueness from birth – our bodies and our genes, our teeth and eyes of course, but everything else as well. And how we each have our own afflictions, from arthritis to obesity to cancer to sore knees and so on. How many of those bits and pieces have their beginnings at birth and just keep developing as we live our lives?
I thought about all the so many good parts spread out among all of us: excellent metabolisms, 20-20 eyesight, unique brains that remember and analyze and create, beauty, athleticism, balance, peacefulness, busy-ness, joy. My combination isn’t like Margaret’s, and Margaret’s isn’t like any one of our kids, although we can see traces of ourselves in them. To say each of us is precious in God’s sight is also to say that we are gifted in our own unique ways. That, Mr. Solomon, is not vanity. That is truth.
But this Singer Solomon knows his words are not gospel truth, nor the end of anything.
Of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh. This is the end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God and keep his commandments, now this is the whole duty of man.
Jesus sent out his disciples, imperfect as they were, with only the clothes on their backs.
Take nothing for the journey.
He teaches them, and us, to rely on just enough physical, but always more than spiritual resources.
Your word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path.
The disciples did good. They did very well.
They set out and went from village to village proclaiming the Good News and curing diseases everywhere.
Jesus sent them and they went. They came back, and all were pleased. We all live in the very same world, in the same last days, and Jesus sends us too.
Clickety-click go our teeth, if we have them, not in fear, but hope, confidence and anticipation.
(Proverbs 30, Psalm 119, Mark 115, Luke 9)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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