TOOTH FAIRY THEOLOGY

When I was a mean little kid growing up with my brothers we occasionally lost a tooth or had one knocked out. We also had the displeasure of rattling a tooth back and forth sometimes for days before we could pull the thing out or have my dad use pliers to pull it out. That was common childhood dental care where I lived.

With the lost tooth we went to bed with the tooth under our pillow and expected the Tooth Fairy to come at night and take the tooth and leave a reward of some kind. It was usually a small amount of money or candy (good for Tooth Fairy business) and we got excited to spend that on a favorite treat.

As I got a little older and started to process religious thoughts from church experience it seemed even way back then to have a familiar Tooth Fairy similarity: be good and trust the church and when you die you wake up in heaven or hell. It was a reward based system and message. You do this and you get that. Don’t do this you get the other that. Even a song about Santa Claus conveyed the same message: ‘He knows when you are sleeping, he knows when you’re awake, he knows if you’ve been good or bad …so be good for goodness sake.’ More Tooth Fairy reward imprint.

The reward of heaven and threat of hell has never been a good motivator for me. When heaven and hell were no longer places and became representational persons of destiny by our choices of loving Jesus and belonging to the Father or choosing Satan and the depths of darkness, sin and death… the Tooth Fairy ideas were gone. The reality of Kingdom life now and forever replaced the concept of rewards and non-rewards.

“For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world should be saved through him. The one who believes in him is not condemned. The one who does not believe has been condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the one and only Son of God.” Jesus