My name is Ben Young, and I am a practicing periodontist in San Antonio, Texas. This is Episode 104. And the title is: Growing Together Along Spiritual Lines.
But first an update from my last podcast dealing with communication and the specific idea of scheduled meetings via Zoom to discuss patient care or any other important topic. It started as a trial and now I have decided it was worth it enough to pay the few-dollar monthly fee to keep the scheduler up and going.
Essentially the idea is this.
If I need to talk with you, my first attempt will not be to call your office during your business hours (unless of course the topic is time sensitive) because this may not be getting you at a good time. Instead, I will email you a note and a link to my zoom meeting scheduler. You then can look at available times and select one. The schedular program will then put it on our calendars and notify us before the meeting. Also, the link to the meeting will then be on our respective calendars and also sent to us via email.
Zoom meetings are efficient and enable us to bring up x-rays and possibly relevant pictures. On average, I have found they last about the same as a typical phone call – around five minutes.
I grew up in El Cajon, California. It is located east of San Diego about twenty miles.
I am the second son in a family of four kids. Two are brothers and one is my little sister.
My brothers became physicians and sis and I took the dental tract.
The reason any of us did any of this, on a purely physical level had to do with three things.
The first was genetics, we inherited things that enabled us to accomplish the mental work necessary to get through school well enough to be accepted to professional schools.
Secondly, we had opportunities based on when, where, and to whom we were born and raised. Born at another time or place and it is pretty clear that all of us would have turned out differently.
And finally, we agreed to cooperate. We did not rebel, at least enough to mess up our careers. We complied with instructions primarily from our parents, but also teachers and other family friends to do the work necessary to develop skills in all sorts of aspects of our lives.
Essentially, we were smart enough, worked hard, kept out of trouble for the most part, and agreed with The Plan.
The Plan, established by our parents was that we would go to college and then professional school. It wasn’t a new plan. Our father and his only brother, our uncle, followed this plan, established by their father, a successful businessman of the time, who believed it made sense to go this route professionally. This resulted in my father taking the dental tract and my uncle becoming an ObGyn. One more point about my dad that influenced me to become a periodontist was that after twenty-five years practicing general dentistry he decided to go back to graduate school for two years in order to return to his same office and start the first endodontic practice in El Cajon.
Now I said that this is the physical explanation. I believe there was an undeniable spiritual component to all of this as well. Our journey as a family took us from living without any spiritual beliefs except for the idea that we as a family need to love each other and stick together – to something much deeper and more profound. Each of us in the family at around the same time in our lives, became Christians. This was so profound to us that I cannot treat it honestly as an isolated compartmentalizable factoid in my or my family’s journey. It affected everything about us including the professional schools we ended up attending and graduating from.
To explain how all this happened might be interesting but is not the direction I would like to go with you today. If you are interested, let me know and I will tell it on another podcast or two. Or go back into the archives and you will find some of this information there.
Here is what I would like you to understand about me, but more importantly, about yourself. We are not accidents. We have been placed specifically in the place, time and circumstances for reasons that are not just for ourselves. And even if I happen to believe this is true, I can’t prove it. What is worse, I do not believe we will ever have all our questions answered while living on this side of the grave. Life will always be shrouded in mystery. I suppose the reason this is the case is because if we could know it all, we wouldn’t need each other and we wouldn’t need to seek and learn to rely on God.
In fact, I have, over a long period of time, come to believe that even though we all start out in different places, God loves each of us just the same and is using, not only our strengths, but more profoundly, our weakness, our trials, our failures, to mold us into becoming perfect representations of who he is to the world around each of us.
Now of course, none of us is perfect, or will become perfect in this life. And perfection is God’s to define, not us.
Another thing that has become clear to me over time is that the more I learn and grow spiritually, the more my sins and shortcomings are revealed to me. In other words, I believe that God knows how much of our own mess we can handle at any one time, so we take a journey of discovery that isn’t always sweetness and light. It is a mix of blessings and challenges all the time. We rejoice and weep routinely.
And this is why we need communities to help us grow. This likely involves family, friends, a church or synagog, as well as professional colleagues.
Which brings up an interesting point and problem.
In today’s secular world, there is a strong pressure to keep any spiritual faith quiet when in patient care. It also is a pressure when it comes to politics. Christianity is told not to participate in the public square – and this comes from both directions. It comes from fellow believers telling others that they should avoid the things of this world. And it comes from those outside of religion, those who publicly declare it all to be superstition and, therefore, Christians must stay out of politics.
Now my understanding of how Jesus lived while he was on this earth is that he spoke out regardless of what the religious and secular powers of the time told him to do. This fearlessness also passed down to his disciples who, suddenly, transformed from the timid men who fled the scene when Jesus was arrested, to fearless defenders of the faith a few weeks later. No longer were they afraid about what might happen to them or intimidated by societal norms. Instead, they began to understand they had a message of hope others needed to hear. I definitely needed to hear it when it was first told to me at age 18.
Now, looking back a couple thousand years later, we can see that Christianity was one of, if not the, strongest influence in the growth of medicine from which dentistry is a branch. I say this because it was from the example of Jesus healing the sick that we began to understand the value of all human life – even the weakest, sickest, and poorest – that faithful followers of Christ would work over generations to develop the hospitals that around us today. Note how many hospitals here in San Antonio are linked to Christian saints and denominations: Saint Lukes Baptist, United Methodist, Crista Santa Rosa…
Western Civilization and Judeo-Christian teachings are linked together – and they are under attack.
So how did I get here from my own personal journey?
Over time, as is likely true for many of you, scales have fallen from my eyes and I see how I have played into a lie that I must respect others by keeping quiet about what I believe. This is the same as voluntarily suppressing my first amendment right to speak my mind. Now I am beginning to understand that we, as individuals, as families, as a society, are healthiest when we can express ourselves freely in respectful ways. We need healthy conversations.
With this in mind, I offer you the following opportunity. On the second and fourth Wednesday of the month I am facilitating a series of videos followed by group discussions entitled “Faith Prescriptions.” This is primarily designed with the healthcare community in mind. In other words, the speakers will be physicians and dentists, and their topics will be wide ranging but within the general subject of living our faith in the secular environments of hospitals and private practices. Having said this, if you for any reason, who happen not to be personally involved with healthcare – perhaps you are a spouse, or are interested in pursuing a career in this field, or you are a patient and want to understand the challenges we face in this field – you are welcome to participate.
Please call my office for more information. Those who wish to attend in person can come at 16:15 pm to have a light meal with us, or you can join on Zoom at 7:15. We should be finished by 8:30.
Finally, I will likely draw topics from this program to discuss on upcoming podcasts – so if you can’t attend, please stay tuned. Also, don’t think you must attend them all. Each topic is self-contained enough to be useful on its own. So, if you are listening to this podcast weeks and months from now, the program is still likely going on, so do call and check it out.
Well, that’s it for today.
This has been The Perio Hygienist Podcast, and I am still Dr. Ben Young.
Thanks for listening.
Bye for now.
A man walks into a bar, and it’s empty – it’s just him and the bartender. He sits down and orders a drink.
He hears someone whisper, “Pssst…I like your tie.” The man looks around but doesn’t see anyone.
“Pssst…that color looks nice on you.” He asks the bartender, “Excuse me, but…are you speaking to me?” The bartender rolls his eyes and says, “No, sorry about that. It’s the peanuts… they’re complimentary.”
