It Changed The Terms Without Asking

Nia stopped taking the stairs about two years ago and nobody has ever mentioned it.

That is the thing about how this happens. There was no announcement. There was a period of taking them slower, and then a period of taking them once and not twice, and then a Tuesday when she went to the lift without deciding to, and now she goes to the lift.

Nobody noticed. Why would they. It is a lift and everybody uses it.

She has a list of these and she has never written it down. Things she quietly stopped doing, none of them individually worth mentioning, which together add up to a different life than the one she had at twenty-nine.

She is thirty-eight.

Some of it is diagnosed and some of it is not, and the not-diagnosed part is its own particular thing, because there is a category of person who has a name for what is happening to them and a category who does not, and the second category has to explain themselves constantly and never convincingly.

She has become very good at the phrase I am just a bit tired.

And what has been hardest is not the pain, and she wants that on the record, because everybody assumes it is the pain and it is manageable most days.

It is that nobody consulted her.

There was no meeting. Nobody with a clipboard came and said, Nia, would you like this body or the other one. It simply began altering the terms of her life, unilaterally, one small clause at a time, and she has been signing the amendments for nine years because there is no alternative.

At about two in the morning, on the bad nights, one sentence turns up.

Nobody asked me. And I am in this body on my own.

You may know that list.

Maybe yours is diagnosed and maybe it is not. Maybe it is a body, or a mind, or a set of things you used to do without thinking about them.

What I am not going to say

Let me clear this room properly, because you have almost certainly had all of it said to you.

I am not going to tell you God gave you this body to teach you something. I do not believe it, I will not write it, and if it has been said to you at a church door then it was wrong and you can put it down today.

I am not going to ask what you are meant to be learning. Not one word.

I am not going to tell you about somebody's cousin who tried a thing. I am not going to suggest a diet, a discipline, a supplement or a posture, and I am not going to hint that if you had more faith the terms would revert.

That last one is the worst of them and it gets said in soft forms constantly. It is not true. It has never been true. Whatever is happening in your body is not a report on your faith, and I will not put that on you, today or ever.

And I am not going to promise you that it improves. I do not know. Nobody writing anything anywhere does, and the ones who promise are selling you something.

I have one thing.

Paul holds two things and does not soften either

There is a sentence in 2 Corinthians where Paul does something almost nobody does, which is to say two true things at once without using one to cancel the other.

For which cause we faint not; but though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day.2 Corinthians 4:16

Read the first half again, because people skip it to get to the comfort.

Though our outward man perish. He does not say seems to. He does not say for a season. He states the deterioration flatly, as a fact, and he does not walk it back anywhere in the chapter.

Then he puts a second fact beside it. Not instead of it. Beside it. And the tense is day by day, which is a present continuous, happening now, in the same body, on the same Tuesday.

He is not saying the body does not matter. He is saying two things are true in the same person at the same time, and one of them being true does not make the other one false.

And what is happening to your body is not the whole account of what is happening to you. The written word states the perishing flatly and puts a second present tense fact beside it without canceling the first, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that land in a woman at two in the morning.

And you are not being renewed later. The word says day by day, which is now and today and this week, and the Spirit is the one doing it rather than something you have to arrange.

The consulting, and who does it

Now let me take up the actual sentence, because I think it is more exact than most people's version.

You did not say why me. You said nobody asked me.

That is a different complaint and it is a better one. It is about being overruled without a conversation, and about a body that submits amendments and does not wait for a signature.

And I am not going to explain that away. It is precisely what has happened.

What I will say is this. There is somebody in the room who did not overrule you and does not submit amendments, and He has been present at every single one of those small unmentioned surrenders. The stairs. The Tuesday. The list you have never written down. He was there for the whole list, item by item, and He did not need it explained.

And He was present for every item on that list. The word says thou compassest my path and my lying down, and art acquainted with all my ways, and the Spirit is the one who makes acquainted mean familiar rather than informed.

And nothing about you is under review. The word says there is now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and the Spirit supplies that in a woman who has quietly wondered.