30 Days with the Word – January 16

30 Days with THE WORD
January 16, 2021

John 1:1-2, ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God,
and the Word was God. He (the Word) was in the beginning with God (NKJV).’

I had a dental appointment this morning to have a broken filling replaced. What an odd sensation. First of all, I don’t spend one moment thinking about how my mouth feels unless I have something wrong like a toothache or a sore, right? But once the dentist begins to numb my mouth that is all I can feel. Is nothing. But I am fully aware that I can feel nothing, so aware that this nothing feels like something.

He applied a topical numbing first that made my gums (which I am not even aware that I have normally) feel barbarously cumbersome and floppy. Then long moments later, he reappeared with this needle that looked only a couple inches long but felt like a foot long. Wait a minute! I shouldn’t have felt that footlong needle. He said I’d feel a pinch but, wowzee, it was more like a punch. I might have even felt that footlong down in my knees, it seemed so invasive.
And then. Suddenly. Nothing. He brought out another needle and it appeared to me to be a foot long this time but now felt like nothing. Air, maybe. I heard the noise, JAB. He flopped my cheek, and I heard that sound too, like a dog’s lips flapping in the wind breezing by an open car window; I felt not a thing.
I think that is how sin is. We have full awareness. We feel everything. We even feel remorse and experience shame and guilt becomes barbarously cumbersome to carry. But the numbing sensation of sin in our lives becomes a footlong needle that pricks and pokes and plunges ever deeper as the enemy de-SINsitizes our hearts. It begins as a dull ache, but before we are able to full acknowledge and understand what has occurred, we are paralyzed. We don’t feel a thing, not even a SIN-sation.

So by this afternoon feeling began to return. My mouth felt huge, awkward, ugly. I talked funny; I talked ‘fat’! I had some errands to do but instead decided to hide inside. Even my mask could not mask the appearance of my condition.
Isn’t that so like sin also? What once was good, acceptable, enamored, beautiful even, now blemished, bearing the discoloration, the stain of shame, that sin leaves behind, an ugliness that becomes the heavy price of the guilt we carry like baggage, disguised and hidden inside the effects of numbing choices.

Psalm 106:15, ‘He gave them the desires of their heart but sent leanness into their soul (NKJV).’