I was hurt by the Church years ago. I had no idea how to handle or work through it at the time, so I reciprocated in kind and left. I left the faith behind and spent the next few years living a spectacularly-sinful life that could give the original prodigal son a run for his money. I’m not proud of any of that, but if it weren’t for those awful years, I would never have met a dentist who I call Saint Nick.
This story is about how God used him to send me on an adventure of the soul that saved it.
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I came to him at a time in my life when no one else would touch me, no one else would be honest with me, and no one else would help me when I needed help the most. Ironically, I met him through one of the most vile, disgusting and evil people I ever had the misfortune of encountering. I almost didn’t keep the appointment because I didn’t want to be associated with anyone who was in her orbit.
Yet, I showed up and bonded with him instantly. He became my friend. Actually, he became my mentor and my anchor in a life that was persistently adrift, and I was fortunate that he allowed me to become his friend out of that.
He ran a small practice on the Southwest side of Chicago, and it was a charming little mom-and-pop place. The décor was part shrine and part scrapbook that showcased a lifetime of love from his patients and devotion to our Lord. The office was littered with all kinds of religious and devotional symbols, classical music played from an old radio by the window, and there was a smattering of Norman Rockwell art mixed in with stuff that people gave to him over the years.
The place showed its age too. It was run down from years of neglect by an absent landlord. He didn’t have any tech or high-end equipment, and I’m pretty sure that his chair was older than my mother. But, nobody seemed to mind, and neither did I. He was out of step with the world around him, yet perfectly-suited for the here and now.
He was also remarkably gentle and inventive with how he treated patients and provided them with options that no one else would. It wasn’t a dental office of last resort for the public. Rather, it was a diamond in the rough that blessed thousands who were fortunate enough to be served by him.
He did work on people that other dentists avoided. He also tailored treatment options to meet people where they were at in their lives instead of fleecing them for things they didn’t need or couldn’t afford. He consistently charged people ridiculously-low prices for expensive procedures, and I can’t tell you how many late nights and long weekends he spent in that office just so he didn’t have to turn people away.
Something broke his spirit early on in his practice, and out of that came this amazing compulsion to exchange a lucrative future in order to be the hands of Jesus in the mouths of sinners.
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He never did the hard sell with respect to God. He just muddled through his day, treated people with deference, kindness and grace, and he just loved them whenever they walked in the door. But, you knew where he stood in his faith and he made no attempts to hide that either. Generations of people from all walks of life and faiths graced that chair and were blessed because of his willingness to say yes to God.
I’m convinced that half of the people who made appointments with him didn’t really need anything done on their teeth- they just wanted to be with him for a little while. He was a keeper of many secrets, a soft spoken pray-er with many a lost soul, and his chair resembled a confessional more than a cash register.
I never met another human being who poured out their life in the service of others in such a consistent, free and unlimited way.
St. Nick was also my connection to God, at a time in my life when the last place I wanted to be was anywhere near the Catholic Church. The funny thing is that I don’t think he knew that until he retired. God was willing to wait years for me to come back, and He used Nick to keep me on spiritual life-support until I made the decision to go back.
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The Covid era took a toll on him. His secretary quit. The ever-changing rules and regulations for healthcare providers made it a challenge to be a one-man shop, and the confusion, divisiveness and heartache in the air was the foundation for most of the conversations he had with people who sat in that chair.
While I bonded with him early on, he bonded with me during that time. I was fortunate enough to be in a position where I could share supplies with him, and we ended up trading PPE and basic essentials back and forth during the first year of the crisis. Who knew that my housemate’s stockpile of everyday items would inadvertently end up helping to keep Nick’s doors open during times when supplies were hard to come by.
It was during Covid that I also had the good fortune to help him out in his office. I popped in for a late-evening appointment and couldn’t help but notice that his office was a complete disaster. Damage from tornadoes doesn’t produce what I encountered when I showed up that day. There was paperwork scattered everywhere, along with x-ray films, dental molds, bills, charts without folders, folders without charts- you name it. If I saw something, it wasn’t where it was supposed to be.
I looked at him, felt sorry for him, and somehow my heart got in front of my brain and I asked if I could help. At first he looked puzzled, then he was apologetic because he couldn’t afford to pay me properly. I told him he didn’t have to pay me anything since I owed him so much anyway, and we ended up settling on a figure that clearly placed me in the category of a volunteer with a stipend, and I was perfectly happy with that.
So, for the next couple of years, I wandered in for a few hours a day and helped however I could. Nothing I did would ever be enough, but it took some of the heat off of him, and it opened my eyes to a world of love, service and sacrifice that I never thought existed in the real world.
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One of the things that I absolutely dreaded, aside from dealing with insurance companies, was answering his messages when he was out of town or out of the office. Half of them were from people who were asking him to pray for this or that, or they had some kind of crisis or needed some kind of favor. They were deeply-personal and difficult to listen to. There were also plenty of people who faked dental problems on weekends in order to try and score painkillers. Then there were the legit patients who had the misfortune of needing help when he wasn’t around for a few days.
I hated that answering machine.
I loved his patients though, and I learned how to love them in ways that he did too. I made a conscious effort to reflect how he treated and talked with them, partly because it was the professional thing to do, and partly because that was the kind thing to do.
Those were his patients, and I was his helper. He just modeled things so well that his kindness was contagious. I’m still nowhere near as good, or consistent, with respect to how I treat others, but anything was better than nothing at that stage of my life.
It’s important to note that I nearly lost my mind when I started helping out there.
I lived with the epitome of a high-risk person at the time. Even though everyone told me not to worry about it, I hunkered down and isolated myself from the world for about a year and a half. Part of it was because I didn’t want to kill-off my second mom, and the other part was that it was just easier to avoid people and get angry at the world while I scrolled through Twitter and watched YouTube videos.
Nick’s office was my soft start back into the real world, and that world was situated smack dab in the middle of a melting pot of everything. After being exposed to two years of toxicity, divisiveness and anger being unleashed by almost everyone on the spectrum, that office turned out to be a sanctuary- a place where people from all walks of life could be loved and treated properly.
I quickly realized that there is far more that unites us, and that if we just give each other a chance, we can be friends. I’m not throwing out some catch phrase or platitude here either- I mean it. If you really want to put an end to a lot of the thorny problems we’re having in society today, just love others the way God wants us to.
How do we do that? Start by reading 1 Corinthians 13, the seminal chapter that describes love from God’s perspective. After that, flip through the Gospel and epistles of John.
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To make a long story short, I used to joke with him about how his office was like a novitiate for me. God used my time there to lay the foundation for a transformation that saved my life and healed my soul. I took what I gleaned from the office and began to bring that into my own world and my interactions with people too. At the time, I was in an area that was ground-zero for societal change, and I was interacting with people from all walks of life on a daily basis. It was a messy place to be, and it still is, but I was able to give and receive lots of love from lots of people because of his influence on me.
Nick brought me back to God, and my time there was the catalyst for the good things that God has done in me over the course of the past few years. It was there that I healed up enough to start making music again. It was there that I began to write again. It was there that I learned how to pray again. It was there that I learned how to love again. It was there that I learned what it meant to serve in the name of our Lord with greater humility and look at all of God’s children with greater compassion instead of judgment.
I’m still far from where God, or I, would like to be, but that time in my life changed everything. I also knew that it wouldn’t last forever, but I wanted it to last as long as possible.
I have a long-running dream of creating a dental clinic in his name one day. It’s an audacious idea, especially considering that I can’t afford to pay my own rent most of the time, let alone build a miracle factory. For the longest time I wanted to share that with him, but I held back because I thought he would think I was nuts. I eventually spilled the beans in passing before he disappeared into the exam room one day. I went back there to ask him something a few minutes later, and I saw him sitting there with tears in his eyes. I quietly walked out and went about my business.
I had no idea at the time, but he was retiring because he was going blind.
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He needed expensive eye treatments, his insurance company stopped paying for them, and he couldn’t cover the cost on his own. I spent the following months helping him to wind down his practice without knowing what was going on. He never told me, but after a while I sensed something was amiss. Sooner or later I figured it out, and I went through all of the stages of grief as time moved on. He even modeled that well too, and that taught me how to be faithful during difficult transitions in life.
He eventually got around to telling me, and I was angry at first because he waited so long. However, much of that anger stemmed from my own self interest. You see, I’ve been cursed with bad teeth. Part of it relates to some genetic defects in my DNA, and part of it is the result of some really terrible life choices I made over the years.
One of the perks of serving him was that I could get patched up on the fly whenever he had time, and I always assumed that he would be around long enough to look after me for years to come. So, I delayed care because I could, and I also put things off because other people had bigger problems and mine could wait.
When I found out the end date was only weeks away, I didn’t want to ask for help because so many other people needed him too, and he was way beyond the point of physical and emotional exhaustion. But I was angry. I was angry and I was disappointed because he left me, me, in the lurch. I was even angrier that we were bullshitting a number of patients by telling them that he was going away for a little while but may be back a few months later.
We didn’t do that to hurt people, rather to prioritize and triage people according to their needs and the limited resources he had left. I think a big part of it was that he also didn’t want to tell the same story over and over again for the better part of a month, and neither did I. It would have killed him. I get that now, but boy was I upset for the first week after officially getting the news.
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It was an interesting time- being stuck with someone I loved so deeply while being so angry with them too. I wanted to leave. I wanted to run. I wanted to hate him, but I just couldn’t. Remember, the only reason we met in the first place was because I did exactly that when I was hurt by my former pastor at the old parish I lived and worked at.
The only difference is that Nick actually invested in facilitating my spiritual growth, unlike that pastor. He prayed with me, unlike that pastor who actually flat-out refused. He modeled for me what it meant to live the Christian life in the world in a selfless way whereas my former pastor was just self-absorbed. Don’t worry, I forgave him too, but I still wouldn’t trust him to bless my cat either.
I was also angry at God, especially for those who would suffer because of this. But, that’s life, and sometimes we just have to deal with it. God isn’t a problem remover, rather a source of grace and strength to carry us through them properly. God wants us to take our struggles and make them holy.
The more I looked at things through his eyes, the easier it was for me to forgive, accept it and just press on. So, I just played along and did my best to help however I could. God did indeed grow me while I was there.
The last day was hard, but it was easier than I expected. I went in for a final cleaning, took a picture of his office, gave him a hug and didn’t tear up until I was back in my car. He stuck around for a few more days before riding off into the sunset, and I haven’t seen him since.
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We keep in touch from time to time, and we’re still close. Believe it or not, he’s moved on to bigger and better things too. He now serves people at a grocery store down south. To anyone else it would be an affront to their personhood, but to him, he’s just happy to do what God wants him to do where God wants him to do it.
I can’t help but wonder if God was waiting for me to be trained by a blind dentist so I could see how to serve the Body of Christ more clearly. One thing is for certain- I never really appreciated the value of rejoicing through struggles, as described in the epistle of James, until I encountered St. Nicholas on the Southwest side of Chicago.
For those of you who are in a profession where you can really do some tangible good, I hope that St. Nick’s approach to service challenges you to do better. Remember that your niche is a gift from God to pass on to others inasmuch as it is a pathway to success in this life. Only you can decide what to do with it, but I hope you make the right choices. You have no idea what kind of impact you can have on souls that God sends your way.
For those of you who are recipients of a special favor from someone, at a time in your life when you needed it the most, please pay it forward. The more we do, the more light we shine in our communities and bring into our relationships.
As life continues to move on, I’m still searching for a new dentist and nothing has really changed on that front. The profession is still full of shysters, crooks and opportunists, and I’ve accepted how that’s just the way things roll in the industry.
I doubt that lightning will strike twice, but I’m definitely a better man because it struck once.
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