I Stopped Expecting My Body To Change

The odd part is not that he stopped. It is that he does not mind, and the not minding is what keeps him awake.

Seven years with this. He has done everything sensible: the appointments, the medication, the physiotherapy, the second opinion. He has also been prayed for, more times than he could count, by people who love him and meant every word.

And somewhere in about the fifth year he stopped asking. Not from bitterness. It simply moved out of the category of things he brings, and settled into the category of things that are true about him, like his height.

That should probably distress him. It does not. What distresses him is that it does not, because he has read enough and heard enough to know what a person is supposed to feel about that, and he feels nothing like it, and he has begun to wonder whether the peace is a real peace or just the shape a man goes when a thing has been carried long enough.

If you have gone quiet about your own body, come and sit on the step. Nothing about your medical care is being touched here, and nothing about your peace is being diagnosed.

The settling is not surrender

Let us describe what happened without assigning it a moral value, because the moral values on offer are all wrong.

One story says the peace is maturity and a man has finally accepted his circumstances, and that story is too tidy. Another says the peace is unbelief and a man has given up on God, and that story is cruel and lands hardest on the person who has held on longest.

The honest description is simpler. A person carrying something for seven years reorganizes around it, because that is what a body and a mind do to stay functional, and the reorganizing is not a theological statement in either direction.

You are not under a charge for going quiet. Nothing about the settling has changed how God is disposed toward you, and no year of not asking has ever counted against you. I am not saying it to be gentle. The written word says he knoweth our frame; he remembereth that we are dust (Psalm 103:14), which is God accounting for what long carrying does to a person, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that hold on a step in the seventh year.

Keep every appointment. Keep taking what has been prescribed. Nothing on this page, in any wording, has anything to do with stepping back from medical care, and any page that hinted at it would be doing you harm.

The man who looked straight at his own body

Here is what steadied me, and it is not a call to start expecting again.

Paul writes about Abraham, and there is a phrase in it that most people read past because it sounds like a technicality.

And being not weak in faith, he considered not his own body now dead, when he was about an hundred years old.Romans 4:19

Considered. In some readings, considered without weakening. Either way, the word means he looked at it. He did not avert his eyes and he did not pretend. A hundred year old man assessed his own body accurately and did not put a gloss on the assessment.

That is what you have done. You have looked at your body and told yourself the truth about it. And Scripture puts that act inside a description of faith rather than opposite it.

You have looked honestly at what is true, and the Word never once required a person to misdescribe their own body. That is written into the verb itself, and the Holy Spirit sets that down in front of a man in his seventh year on a step.

Nothing is being predicted about your body

Something has to be said very plainly, because this is exactly where pages like this one do damage.

I am not going to tell you your body is about to change. Not that a healing is coming, not that it is close, not that God is about to move. I have not been given that, and a promise invented here would sit on your chest every morning it did not arrive, and I would rather leave you with a quiet page than a loud one.

You have God's disposition toward you settled, and nothing about an outcome is being announced over your body. Scripture says the Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering (2 Peter 3:9), which speaks about His character and never about a timetable, and the Holy Spirit is the One who has been on that step through the years of asking and the years of quiet on the same terms.

And if the seven years have cost more than anybody around you knows, if sleep has gone, if the evenings have started to frighten, please talk to somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, a crisis line, and the emergency services if there is danger to anybody tonight. That is not a detour around God. It is one of the ways He keeps people.