Friday, September 22, 2017

I DO NOT HAVE A BROKEN ARM (even though my mouth hurts like the dickens!)

This week I visited a perfectly normal-looking highly educated gal in her office, and she proceeded to shoot my mouth with needles full of meds. pull my tooth, grind and scrape at the bone, and screw in an implant. Then, as if that wasn't enough, she slit open the roof of my mouth and cut out the skin, stitched the remaining skin together, then stitched that chunk of flesh onto my gums. After a couple hours she smiled and told me to take good care and she'd see me in a couple weeks.
"If those stitches start to bother you, just snip the ends of them off."
Now, two days later, I feel like an asphalt grinder has been at work on the inside of my mouth. while a Rock-Em-Sock-Em Robot has been punching away at my jaw. And just to make the deal a little sweeter, a spider is attached to the roof of my mouth, his wiry legs left dangling against my tongue. I don't have scissors trusty enough to disarm them.
So there... I've said my piece and now I will say more, because that's what I generally do. Sorry.
This afternoon Dave needed me to follow him to the repair shop to get the brakes on my car fixed. As I was driving along Main street, my gums burning, my head pounding, my jaw aching, and that spider dangling, I was struck with the realization that my feet are feeling relatively good. You may or may not know that I live with peripheral neuropathy from a frightening bout with Guillain Barre Syndrome ten years ago. My feet always hurt. But today, they don't. Well... if I let myself focus on them I remember they do... but relative to more prominent pain, they don't.
Then, as I drove on, I realized that I do not have a broken arm, or a heart condition, or cancer... at least that I know of. I am not paralyzed, and I have all my limbs, and every one of my fingernails and toenails is intact. And, even though I am prone to them, I do not have an ingrown toenail.
In fact, I am reminded that it is a beautiful thing that I could make a visit to that capable and good natured Dr. Skene and have her clean out my abscessed tooth and implant a good solid base upon which they will place a nicely matched fake tooth in a few months. And I am likely to keep my own relatively healthy teeth because she has built up the gums that were receding. It hurts now. But it won't in a while.
I am experimenting on the Word today. I believe all things are designed to give me experience.
I cannot NOT learn.
And my Lord is with me, even in my relative discomfort.
I am training my brain to differentiate between pain and discomfort. And I am trying to train it to handle both with grace and faith.
(But these spider-legged stitches dangling from the roof of my mouth... I have less patience with them!)
I am reminded today that my troubles and pains and sorrows sit in beautiful contrast to the blessings in my life. Hooray, for instance, that I even have teeth!
Onward, Christian soldier!