Recently I got my first crown. It was a long process that required drilling out an old filling and carefully fitting the crown on my broken tooth. The dentist was young. Maybe a year or so out of dentistry school and new to the practice. He’s a wonderfully polite guy who called me “sir” even after I reminded him of my name and asking me with “please” and “thank you” to turn my head this way or that and to open my mouth just a bit wider.
After several hours it was finally time to fit the crown. Home stretch. Let’s go! In it went, I bit down to test the alignment and . . . it needed another adjustment. That’s fine. It happens. Second try. No good. Over and over the dentist trimmed and adjusted the crown and over and over it failed sit in its designated space. “Just a few more minutes” stretched into an hour.
My wife, Joy, texted:
Are you coming home? I need the car.
Me (with hope I didn’t feel):
They said it’s almost done. Maybe half an hour?
But the half hour passed, my wife drove our van to the dentist to swap for the car and I sat in the chair enduring more poking and prodding.
Suddenly it occurred to me that maybe this dentist would never finish. Maybe it was taking so long because he didn’t know what he was doing. And at that very moment I was done. “MmmmMmm”, I hummed to the dentist. “Excuse me, sir?” he asked as he pulled his tools out of my mouth. “Restroom,” I said. I didn’t need a restroom, but I didn’t want to sit in that chair with my mouth gapping open even a minute longer. I had, quite literally, lost faith in the dentist and I could no longer endure.
There’s a famous sentence in the Bible:
Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.
I’ve heard this phrase used in all sort of situations, but it was just today, in a Bible study at church, that I fully understood what it really means. It doesn’t mean that we need to believe in God even if we can’t prove He exists. It doesn’t mean faith is opposed to science. It doesn’t mean faith is blind hope.
No, it means that after messaging my jaw and pretending to use the restroom, I got back into that chair and let my dentist finish that crown. I endured because I had faith, in spite of the hours of waiting, that he knew his business. And, of course he did. Virtually everyone else in the office had left, but at long last I walked down to the van and drove myself home with a sore jaw and a new crown.