#Why Crowntown is a Land of Wilderness
Tags: Grace, Dentistry, Debt, Student Loans

Living in a land of wilderness denotes a couple things: 1) being literally surrounded by deserts and fields of dead grass, and 2) more figuratively speaking, enduring through a difficult, unexplored path. Crowntown is both. Located two and a half hour car ride from a major metropolitan city in the West Coast, this small town sits just a little shy away from the Sierra Nevada. If you wanted to, you could easily do a 1-day hiking trip into the National Park. It is surrounded by expanses of farmlands, wilderness, and mountains. In ten minutes, you’ve already driven to the opposite side of town. Another ten minutes, “please visit again,” you are already out into the wilderness, away from stores and homes and people.

How on earth did I end up working up here? Earlier this year, the state I live in created and passed a bill allowing incentive money to be given out to physicians and dentists who commit to serving people who are beneficiaries of state health care program. This incentive money will be used to pay off student loan, and the commitment is for at least a year, up to five years. By God’s grace, I was selected as one of the forty dentist awardees in the whole state. This application cycle saw around 350 dentist applicants, so the odds were 1 out of 10. Truly the grace of God. The amount of incentive money I would receive by the end of the 5 years equals my total student loan. That is a whopping 15 years less worth of student loan payment.

Rewind a few months back, God knew how desperate I was. I was sitting down with my pastor at church on a Sunday morning. He asked how I was doing, and suddenly the dam broke, a flood of emotions sweeping through me. The dam I had been holding up for so long. I had to help finance my brother’s wedding the previous year and financially accommodate my mom losing her job the month after. My dad, as always, was incapable and absent through it all. Since I started working as a dentist last year, I put financial weight on myself out of pure necessity. There was no one else in the family who could. I was suffocating under debt. I was stretched thin, not able to pay back the student loan as planned. “Not good,” I replied back to my pastor and explained what I was going through. He asked, “What has to happen for this financial situation to resolve?” Tears welling up, I muttered, “I don’t know. A miracle.”

Then the miracle happened. Like the manna that came to the Israelites in the wilderness every day, the loan repayment program was born and fell on my lap. That is what grace is. A gift I do not deserve. It comes with a catch, though. I must rely on the Giver. Total dependency. Without it, all of my life will cease and won’t operate. It means having total faith in God, who will take care of me, no matter what. It means trashing my own agenda because it has no use. It means being faithful each day to what the Master has called me to, and waiting patiently for His action. But I used to wonder — what would it be like, not having to wait for God’s daily provision? What would it be like to have enough money, enough peace to not worry about the future? I have an idea: you won’t experience grace anymore. That’s what happened to the Israelites after they settled down in the land of Canaan. When they harvested their first fruits and crops, manna stopped. And they were not in the wilderness anymore.

Crowntown is my wilderness. This is where I daily experience God’s grace. It supplies me with hope, energy, and joy. This is where I train my spiritual muscles of faith. Also, it is where I grow in my career. As the managing dentist, I am learning to manage people. I am learning to be faster and more efficient in dentistry. I am breaking personal records of number of patients I see in a day, or the amount of money I’m bringing to the office in a day. I am learning to bring positivity and change to a toxic working environment under a micro-managing, fear-instilling boss. I am learning to endure through the wilderness. I have to remind myself that all I have to do is respond humbly to God’s grace. It means being faithful each day at work. It means stretching out my hand everyday and collecting manna that is already free.

* “Crowntown” is an alias for the city I work in.