Our dentist’s office includes a “benefits manager” whose job it is to take the treatment plan for each patient and help them coordinate their insurance coverage with the work they need done. She tells me how much coverage I have left in any given calendar year and we schedule work accordingly.
She should more accurately be called the benefits mis-manager. After my 1-hour appointment to get the permanent bridge installed she met me at the counter and, very sheepishly, asked if we could talk in her office. I suspected trouble when the dental assistant said - and I quote - “I’m getting out of here.”
She had not factored into my tab a root canal I had done in February. As a result, this bridge is not covered by our insurance; my benefits were exhausted for 2010 when the root canal was done. So if anyone is looking to buy a bridge, I have one for sale. It ain’t the one in Brooklyn but it doesn’t take up that much room. The price may be fairly close, however.
The dentist thinks the pain I’ve had comes from an ill-fitting temporary bridge that’s been in there for the last three weeks. He says it could take a few days for the irritation of my gum to subside, “So keep eating those Ibuprofen” until it goes away. He put the permanent crown on with a temporary adhesive in case the pain doesn’t go away and he has to go back in there to fix something.
You can see the problem, can’t you.
I went from the dentist’s office to that job over in Sun City West at a home that will close soon. The roof repair was minor, , the gutters are cleaned, the hot water drain valve was replaced without problems, the stress clamp on the disposal required removing the unit from under the sink but that went OK, and in a community for only those over 55 the stove now has a tip-preventer so the it can’t fall over if a kid stands on an open oven door.
Last Sunday our series in 1 Timothy took us to the last chapter of that book and the section where Paul talks about contentment. We agreed contentment comes especially tough in our materialistic culture.
In our adult class the following hour I asked, almost rhetorically, whether a believer should have cosmetic surgery. Several of the women seemed rather surprised that the issue came up during a round of golf last fall.
Yesterday I got a haircut and had a conversation with the gal about the two kinds of men who come into Super Cuts. She said some are like me and just want it shorter and decent looking. Me getting picky about a haircut calls to mind the proverb about dressing a pig in pearls. Other guys, she said, are extremely finicky and demanding. I wondered out loud what they must be like with really important issues in their lives. Worse yet, what if their hair does rank as an important issue in their life?
(We also talked about women who color their hair, but even I’m not dumb enough to go there in a blog post.)
These three lines of conversations came together as I thought about them on the way to the dentist this morning. I thought about how contentment as a biblical virtue extends beyond things to appearance. My appearance is more than the outcome of the combined chromosomes from Norm and UnaJean MacDonald. Every part of me was knit together by our sovereign God, including the genes that produced a tall, skinny guy with a big nose, bad eyes and just barely enough coordination to put one foot in front of the other.
The odds are stacked against us. Not only do we live in a culture obsessing about stuff but consumed with physical appearance. So no, I won’t be getting braces, having rhinoplasty or dying my hair. I find it more challenging than resisting the purchase of a flat screen HDTV, but I’m going to work harder at accepting my appearance as the result of God’s specific design, and therefore something that demands I respond with contentment.
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