It Gave Out Lifting Nothing

The sock was navy blue and it was lying six inches from her left foot, and it was twenty past six on a Tuesday morning, and she bent to pick it up the way a person has bent ten thousand times without once thinking about it.

Something low in her back let go.

Not a tear. Not a pop. Nothing dramatic enough to tell anybody about afterwards. Just a bright white line of pain from her belt to her ribs, and then her palms were flat on the carpet and her cheek was against the side of the mattress and she could not work out how to reverse the movement she had just made. She stayed where she was. The radiator ticked twice. Downstairs the kettle she had switched on before she came up clicked itself off, and she listened to it click, and she thought, very calmly, I am going to have to shout for help.

She did not shout. It took her about four minutes to get herself sideways onto the floor, and then she lay there looking at the underside of the bed, at a hairband and more dust than she would have liked, and the sock was still there. Navy blue. Unlifted.

That was eleven months ago.

Eleven months of the hard chair brought in from the dining room, because the sofa is wrong now and the sofa was hers. Eleven months of a physiotherapist who is kind and a waiting list that is not. Eleven months of putting her shoes on sitting down, of turning her whole body to talk to the person walking beside her, of the small precise humiliation of asking a twelve year old to reach the bottom shelf.

And every single time, somebody asks her the same question. What were you lifting?

Here is where her morning stops being hers and starts being yours, because you already know what she says. You have said it yourself. You get a little laugh in first, to arrive ahead of it, and then you say: nothing. A sock. The kettle. The corner of a duvet. I was picking up a pen off the floor.

Then you watch their face do the thing their face does. It is not unkindness. It is a tiny recalculation, and you can see it happen. Because a back that gives out under a piano is an injury, and a back that gives out under a sock is somehow a personality, and by now you can hear it in your own mouth. The apology in the voice. The quick shrinking. The sentence you have worn smooth from handling: it is nothing, it is just my back, it has been like this a while.

You are not exaggerating. You never were. But nobody believes a wound with no story attached to it, and you have been carrying one for eleven months.

Eighteen years, and nobody had a story for hers either

Let me say the low place out loud before I say one hopeful word, because in my house we do not throw a blanket over a person and call that comfort.

There is a tiredness in this that sleeping does not touch, because you cannot find the position. The geography of your own house is learned now by what each part of it costs: the second stair, the low cupboard, the car door. You do the maths before you accept an invitation, and then you accept and you pay for it for two days and you tell nobody, because your allowance of being the one with the back is already used up.

And underneath all of it there is an accusation, and it is not gentle, and it comes in your own voice. You should have kept up the exercises. You sat badly for fifteen years. Heavier than before. Older than before. Other people manage. It was a sock.

Set that down for a moment. Just set it down on the floor beside you, we will come back for it if we need it.

Because I want to show you a woman in Luke's account who had no story either. She had been bent over for eighteen years. Bent double, Luke says, unable to straighten herself up at all. Eighteen years of the ceiling being a rumor and the floor being the whole view. And Luke, who was a physician and interested in exactly this sort of detail, never tells us how it began. No fall. No accident. No lifting. Nothing to say at the door when somebody asked her.

She was in the assembly house on the Sabbath, and she had not come for herself. There is no request from her anywhere in the passage. She did not push forward. She was not on a list. She had come the way a person comes who has stopped expecting, because it is Sabbath and you go.

And when Jesus saw her, He called her over and said to her, "Woman, you are set free from your weakness."Luke 13:12

Hold that first phrase. When Jesus saw her. She was folded at the waist. The only thing in her field of vision was the floor and other people's feet. She could not have seen Him. He saw her, and the seeing was not something she achieved. The same Spirit who rested on Him in that assembly house was in your bedroom at twenty past six, and He has never once needed you to be facing the right way.

Then He called her over. Across a room. Out loud, in front of everyone, in the one place where a bent woman had spent eighteen years arranging herself at the back so as not to be a spectacle. He did not go quietly to the edge of the crowd and whisper. He gathered the whole room's attention and put it on her, and it turned out to be the safest place she had ever stood.

And listen to what He actually said, because the grammar is the good news. You are set free. Not you will be. Not let us see how this goes. He announced it as an accomplished thing, and only afterwards did He lay hands on her, and only after that did she straighten. The word came first. She was not asked to demonstrate anything to earn it, and she was not asked to explain how she got that way. That is the grammar the Holy Spirit is still speaking in, present tense, over a woman on a bedroom carpet who never did get to tell anybody what she was lifting.

And when the man in charge complained that she had been healed on the wrong day, Jesus called her a daughter of Abraham. He gave her a lineage in front of the person who had just described her as an inconvenience. That is what He does with people whose suffering has become awkward for the room.

Now hear this next part plainly, because I will not mumble it. Keep your appointment. Take what was prescribed for you, at the hour they told you to take it. Do the boring exercises the physiotherapist wrote out for you. None of that is a lack of faith, not one bit of it, and none of it is you hedging your bets. God has put real wisdom into human hands, and reaching for it is not reaching away from Him. Faith and the waiting room have never once been enemies.