After an embarrassingly long lapse, I went to the dentist today for a cleaning. I'm glad to report that my teeth are healthy. Just a couple of preventative measures to take. (And the suggestion that I visit the dentist more often, but then, dentists are always saying things like that.)
While I was in the chair, I had this fleeting--yet vivid--vision of visiting the dentist in the distant past, and how nasty and painful and bloody it must have been. I was very glad to be in this twenty-first century office with its sanitary rubber gloves and whirring little tools and polishers, as opposed to in a field or vermin-infested room with the sharp, rude instruments I've seen in historical medical displays. It's a good time to be alive. At least for dentistry.
But all of this led me down a path of musing about whether society as a whole was progressing or degenerating. Or both. Or neither. And--at the risk of sounding irresolute and/or vacillating--today my opinion was leaning towards neither. Or maybe both.
I mean, really, the world is and always has been made up of people, yes? People who are--as a result of Original Sin and all that jazz--desperately wicked by nature. But (fortunately) the world also is and always has been full of people who have been redeemed by God: people in and through whom He is at work. Not to mention Common Grace. His grace is evident throughout the world, fallen though it is, and His goodness is displayed through His people.
His goodness isn't getting any less or more (given that it's already infinite and perfect). And somehow I have a hard time believing that He is any less (or more) at work now than he was ten or fifty or five hundred years ago; that is, that people were any less wicked naturally or that He was any less able to work through them to His glory. I think maybe it's more like the pattern we can see in the microcosm of The Church: each generation seems to swing back and forth, bettering some areas which need improvement while themselves leaving plenty of areas for their children to criticize and change. Perhaps in society it is merely that wickedness and goodness manifest themselves in ever-changing ways, so to look at one issue--sexual impurity or stewardship, violence or compassion for the oppressed--gives the illusion of universal "degredation" or "progress." Maybe it depends on where you're looking.
Perhaps this is obvious, and I'd simply never aritculated it to myself before. Perhaps this is totally wrong. Perhaps it didn't come out in words quite the way it came together in my head, which was really more of an impression than anything else.
I do know, though, that you can get a lot of good thinking time in at the dentist.
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2 comments:
Hmmm. Very thought provoking. Hmmm.
I have had similar thoughts, but starting from the other direction. People sometimes pine away for the "good ole days" when a promise was a promise, when people got married instead of just living together, and they didn't user swear words on TV.
But while some things were better in limited-scope kinds of ways, there were also things in the past that we are very glad to have in the rearview mirror. Like government-supported slavery. Or Nazism.
But even more than just balancing out, I don't think things can be so easily generalized. In the old days, there *was* a lot of non-marital sex, even if talking about it was taboo. And today, there are still neo-Nazis, even though most people avoid being associated with them.
It's a fallen world, and there will be evil throughout the generations.
It's also a redeemed world, and God's goodness shows up in many places throughout the generations.
But I certainly agree that I'm glad to be alive at a time when dental tools "whirr" rather than "crank," and the term, "bite the bullet" has become a figure of speech rather than an actual substitute for anesthesia. :-)
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