Close encounters of the prayer kind

One of my hobbies is going to the dentist. It’s not much fun, and it’s kind of expensive, but nothing is perfect in this life.

One day recently, as I sat in the dentist chair staring at the second hand of the large clock on the wall, I could hear, in that unique working-class South Philadelphia accent that pierces high-pitched Torquemada dentist drill sounds, the woman in the next cubicle sharing with a way-too-young-sounding postulant a sad autobiography, mediated through the prism of her dental history.

When she was 12, a bully had pulled her off the jungle gym and broke her grill. She has a cat who is 15 and blind, and she’s on anti-psychotic meds (the woman, not the cat) and thinks this is what’s making her mouth dry. Her former dentist was a “moron,” and she won’t give his name. (She said this two times, leading me to think that upon the slightest prompting, she might spill out the name the third time around.) This was a woman living below Francis Schaeffer’s line of despair.

I am lately alarmed to notice how I tend to go through the day mentally noting all kinds of people, and going no further in my mental process than this disinterested registering of the data: I like this guy, I dislike that woman, this woman has a chip on her shoulder, that guy has a fear-of-man problem.

So I am deliberately developing a habit of praying for people as I encounter them, rather than merely being the armchair anthropologist of Philadelphia. This is at first challenging, like sprouting new neuron growth where there were formerly no brain cells. But it is surprising how quickly the habit is established—and how gratifying it is spiritually. Jesus said our righteousness must exceed that of the Pharisees (Matthew 5:20), and one good way to exceed it, I think, is to add this step of prayer to one’s pedestrian daily encounters. It is difficult to write off a person when you are praying for him.

It is difficult to write off a person when you are praying for him.

So I prayed for the woman on the other side of the partition. I asked God to arrange it so that our appointments would end at the same time so I might say a word to her about God. As it turned out, she was dismissed before I was. But since she had to pass behind me to leave the operatory, I shot a glance from my seat so that I would recognize her (still believing that God would answer my prayer). Sure enough, when the dentist was done with me, I found the South Philly woman still at the front desk, venting some other kind of distress to the receptionist. There was a man, her husband, I assumed, with her. I bided my time, and when they started down the corridor I made my move.

“Excuse me, but I was in the chair on the other side of you,” I began. “Whaaa?” said the woman, looking me up and down, and brushing me off like I was some kind of weirdo, which now I also appeared to myself to be. “I would like to pray for you,” I continued, and she laughed, perhaps grateful I wasn’t selling something or begging for a handout. “I mean right now,” I clarified, and her weirdo assessment solidified and she grumbled off to pay her bill.

Then I said to her husband what turned out to be the magic words: “I heard about your cat.” At this the man, hitherto silent, stopped in his tracks. I had found his subject, the theme of his heart’s song. I started to speak of God, but his wife, now done with the business office, arrived and put an end to it. I walked out of the building.

A moment later, I got a call on my cell phone. “Come back,” the receptionist told me. “The doctor forgot to do something in your mouth.” This was a first. I returned, my novice dentist finished her job, and then I saw the husband seated in the waiting room again. I told him about heaven. A tear went down his right cheek. “You just need to put your trust in Jesus,” I said. We had made a connection. Praise God who answers prayer.