Do You Have a Dentist?

“Do you have a dentist?” That simple question lies in the middle of our health screen. Assuming you go through the items in the screen in order, you ask about the dentist somewhere between diabetes risk and food access. But yesterday, while sitting with a woman on a crumbling stone wall along Allegheny Ave, I reached the dental question after our conversation took an unexpected and heartbreaking turn. After a brief conversation about food security, she explained that she’d been unhoused for five months and had barely slept over the past two days. “It’s hard to find a safe place to sleep at night”, she told me as she sagged against the broken gate behind her, her forehead falling sideways against the rough stone wall as she struggled to stay awake. In the months she’d spent homeless, she experienced various trials.

But even those things seemed trivial compared to the next night she described, the night she’d lost consciousness in an alley and awoke disoriented to a man dragging her. He attacked her, stole her belongings, then left her alone on the street. Hurt, she crawled through pitch black until she stumbled into a nearby train station, where two transit police officers found her and drove her to the ER. She recounted all of this in a straightforward, detached tone, her face calm and impassive like she was telling me about a boring Tuesday afternoon rather than something extremely difficult that she had endured.

When her story finished I sat frozen on the wall beside her, too stunned to speak, some part of me wondering wildly how the blazing afternoon sun could have the nerve to shine so brightly when this woman had endured something so terrible. In the silence that passed between us, she nodded off again, sagging quietly against the gate, and I stared blankly down at the screening form in my numb hands and saw the next question I was supposed to ask: “Do you have a dentist?” How insignificant, how pointless, how utterly stupid that seemed now after what I’d heard. After what she’d survived. When you’ve gone through something like that, who cares about having a dentist? I was at a loss for words, other than to tell her, from the bottom of my heart, that I was sorry that this had happened to her. She stirred awake again, realized what I said, and gave me a resigned little shrug. “I don’t care much, really about what happens to me anymore”.”

Again, her response stopped me dead. For someone who loves to talk so much, I had absolutely nothing to say. Nothing I could ever say, nothing I could ever do for her could change what had happened. My words were as useful to her as asking about a dentist. I felt so powerless, insignificant, and small compared to the heavy, leaden weight of the trauma she’d suffered. But as I sat with her in silence, praying for her all the while, I realized that it wasn’t because of her story that I felt like that, it was because I’m human. I’m human, and therefore I’m always powerless, insignificant, and small. Only God is mighty, only He can heal and restore, only He is big enough and great enough to stand before darkness like that and tell it to submit. His grace, His mercy, the redeeming power of His love and His perfect will are the things that could make that woman well. Not my health screen, my stethoscope, or my feeble human hands. This I reminded myself as we chatted some more, the sobering but liberating thought that even though I am small, and though her pain is massive, Christ is bigger still. God also reminded me that He can—and often does—operate through the small. I didn’t heal that woman, fix her trauma or get her off of the street, but God ordained for us to meet on that wall perhaps because of the small things. A cup of cold water, a few granola bars, a list of nearby food resources, a prayer for a safe place to sleep that night. Those things I gave to her, pitiful, maybe, through worldly eyes, but a faithful offering before God and all our Lord asks of us. Had I trusted in my own power to help that woman, I’d have been woefully hopeless as we finished her screen and she walked away down the street. I don’t know where she is now, but I pray for her still, and I trust that God’s perfect will will prevail and am so thankful that He is mighty to save so that the rest of us don’t have to be.