She didn’t want to go to the dentist.
My friend already knew she had cavities, and she knew the dentist would want to do something about them. If she avoided seeing him, she could ignore the problem a little longer. It’s easy to ignore a cavity if the tooth is still functioning. Drills and fillings feel drastic when it’s entirely possible to carry on as normal with no intervention at all. The easiest way to deal with a little bit of decay is to apply a little bit of wilful ignorance to it. The trouble, of course, is that wilful ignorance is not an effective treatment for cavities. It only gives them time to grow. And as the decay grows, the wilful ignorance will have to grow with it. To keep a growing problem out of our minds, we must continually increase the capacity of our tolerance for it, slowly expanding the diameter of our blind spots to fit over its ugly edges.
I’m not just talking about teeth. As bad as it is to lose a tooth that has rotted from the inside out, it’s far worse when this happens to our souls. It could be a secret sin, held quietly in the corner, taken out and enjoyed whenever the gaze of others is turned away. Porn. Resentment. Anger. Jealousy. Discontentment. Self-pity. A driving need for control. A small pin-prick through the enamel of the soul. A small foothold for rot to take root. In the darkness of being ignored, it grows. And in the act of ignoring a problem that we know exists, our tolerance also grows. We become accustomed to the dark spots being just a little bit bigger than they were, a little bit darker, and deeper. If the destruction happened all at once, we’d probably be shocked into action. When the progress of the decay is imperceptibly slow, it’s easier to just re-size our wilful ignorance so that it keeps covering the problem for as long as possible. Until everything falls apart.
Sometimes people wonder how western culture was allowed to reach such an advanced stage of decay. How Epstein’s associates still walk free, and politicians openly enrich themselves, and how truth became a malleable weaponed to reshape, reframe, and enflame. It didn’t happen overnight. The pinpricks were always there. And every time we ignored them—when we overlooked a lie, or excused an affair, or when we just stayed silent about the problems on our side because the other side was worse—they grew. And with them, our tolerance also grew. What happens with teeth also happens with our souls, and with our societies.
I am firmly convinced that the gospel of Jesus Christ is the only drill that can cut to the root of all our wrongs and bring real restoration to any soul, or any society. It is drastic—we must allow the blade to reach deep into the rot in our own hearts, first. We must die to ourselves to live with Christ. But it’s time we realised that our attempts to live without him are only a slow kind of death, from the inside out. Restoration won’t happen without drastic intervention. It’s time to stop pretending that the decay we’re living with is manageable, something we can look away from and cover a little longer, with a little more wilful ignorance. It’s time we went to the dentist.
sethlewis.ie 