The Body I Have Now

Five in the morning is not a time. It is a place, and she knows every inch of it.

The lamp on the small side, the one that does not wake him. The heat pad that has to be reheated at three and again at five and is never quite the right temperature at either. The book on the nightstand that she has read the first four pages of eleven times, because the pain does not stop her reading, it stops her keeping what she read. The pill organizer with the days on it in little raised letters, which she runs her thumb across in the dark to find Thursday.

She has been in this room at this hour for nine years. The nerve does not repair. She has three specialists who agree about that in three different vocabularies, and she takes what they give her, and she goes to the appointments, and none of it is a cure and none of them has ever pretended it was.

That is not the thing she cannot say out loud.

The thing she cannot say out loud is that she stopped asking.

It happened gradually, the way these things do. There were the prayer lines. There were eleven or twelve years of them, hands on her back, good people, meaning every word. There was the conference where a man said something over her with real authority and she went home lit up and lay awake with hope in her chest like a swallowed coal, and the next Monday was the same as every other Monday, and it was not the pain that took two weeks to get over. It was the Monday. There was the woman who prayed for her three times and then stopped meeting her eyes in the hallway, and she understood exactly why, and it broke something anyway.

So somewhere around year six she stopped raising her hand. She still prays. She prays at five in the morning most days, quite a lot, about her son and about her husband's job and about the woman two doors down. She has simply stopped asking anybody, God included, for the one thing, out loud, in a room with other people in it.

And she is fairly sure that makes her a bad Christian. Nobody has ever said it to her. She says it to herself at five in the morning, in a room with a lamp on and a heat pad going cold, and she has never once said it to another human being.

You have your own five in the morning. It might be a hip or a lung or a nerve or an ear that will not stop ringing, and it might not be pain at all; it might be a thing about your mind or your memory or your hands. You know the shape of it and you know what the doctors have said and you have stopped repeating it to people, and somewhere in there you stopped raising your hand too. You have not disqualified yourself from anything by going quiet. That is not me being nice to you; it is written in Psalm 73:26 that flesh and heart do fail, put there by a man God kept in the Bible for saying it, and it is the Holy Spirit who has been in this room at this hour the entire time you have been too tired to ask for anything.

The verse that grants the failing

Almost every verse people bring you at five in the morning argues with your body. This one does not, and that is why it is the one I am bringing.

Psalm 73 is written by a man named Asaph who opens by admitting his feet had almost slipped. Not a serene man. A man who looked at how comfortable other people's lives were and nearly came off the road entirely, and says so in the first ten verses without softening any of it.

And then, near the end, he writes this:

My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.Psalm 73:26

Read the first half again, because everybody skips it to get to the good part. My flesh and my heart may fail. He grants it. He does not rebuke it, he does not claim otherwise, he does not tell his flesh to line up. He lets the failing stand in the sentence as a real thing that happens to real bodies, including his.

And then the second half does not undo the first half. Watch it carefully, because this is the whole architecture of the verse: he does not say but God will fix my flesh. He says God is the strength of my heart. The word underneath strength there is the ordinary Hebrew word for a rock, so the line reads that God is the rock of his heart, and his portion, forever. A rock is not a repair. A rock is what you are standing on while the thing that is failing continues to fail.

You are standing on something that is not going to fail with your body, and it is holding at this exact hour. That is written into Psalm 73:26 in that order, the failing first and the rock second, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a written rock into something a person can actually feel under them at five in the morning with the lamp on.

Nobody here is going to hint

Now I am going to say plainly what this page is not doing, because you can smell a setup at forty paces by now and you deserve better than to spend the next four paragraphs braced for one.

There is no hint here. Nothing on this page is going to turn at the end and suggest that your body is about to surprise you. There is no wink, no story of a woman who was just like you until the last paragraph, no closing line arranged so that hope leaks back in through the door. I am not going to do that to you. The reason is simple: you have had it done to you enough times to have built a nine year callus over that exact spot, and I would rather be trusted than be encouraging.

And nothing here asks you to put down a single thing a doctor has put in your hand. Keep the appointments. Take what you are prescribed. Nothing on this site has ever been an argument against medicine and this article is not going to be the first.

So here is what is actually true, and it is enough to have gotten up for. Restored is not the same word as replaced. Replaced would mean a body handed back the way it was in the year before, the nerve intact, the mornings ordinary. That is not what is on the table. Restored is different work altogether and it happens to the person, which is a separate thing from the flesh, and Asaph knew they were separate because he named them in two different halves of one sentence.

And about the asking. Paul asked three times about the thing in his own body that would not go, and then he stopped asking, and the Bible records the stopping without one word of rebuke attached to it. Nobody in Scripture tells him he gave up. The record simply moves on, with the thorn still in him and the man still apostle. You are carrying no shame that Scripture actually assigns to you, and none was ever put there by God. It is written in 2 Corinthians 12 that grace was what answered the third asking, and it is the Holy Spirit who has been holding you steady through years of not asking, without once treating your silence as a withdrawal.