Where Did My Teeth Go?

I have the privilege this week of spending a couple nights with an elderly lady while her husband is away. She is still very independent, but unfortunately she has dementia, so she needs help remembering to take her medicine. While I was over there tonight she had misplaced her dentures, something that happens quite frequently I gathered. We spent about 30 minutes looking for them, but to no avail. It did give me a chance to think of an analogy, though, to our spiritual life.

How often do we lose our spiritual teeth? You know, the part of our mind that wrestles with spiritual truth and difficult passages. How often do we stop chewing on the Word because it’s tough, and then months later wonder where our teeth went? Believe me, I know it’s easy to accept everything you hear from your pastor or Christian leader that you trust without checking to make sure that it is in line with the Bible. I do it all the time, but I shouldn’t. Humans make mistakes, that just the way life is. Having someone that explains to you the difficult passages of Scripture is very helpful and beneficial, but we need to work through those passages ourselves, wrestle with them and draw our own conclusions based on the rest of Scripture. If we don’t, we are in a good place to lose our teeth. It might be easier to be spoon-fed, but one day we’ll wake up and realize that we don’t have any teeth left…and we won’t know where they’ve gone.