Still Here, Still Willing

She had eleven good days in a row, and on the eleventh she did something she had not done in two years. She wrote a plan on the calendar. Nothing grand. Her sister's birthday lunch, the second Saturday, the place down the road with parking right out front so she would not have to walk far. She wrote it in pen.

Friday night it came back. Not slowly, not politely. It came back the way it always comes back, and by ten o'clock she was sitting on the bathroom floor with the light off, because the light hurt too, running the arithmetic she had run a hundred times. Cancel tonight, or cancel in the morning. Morning is worse for everybody. She sent the message at 11:40 and turned the phone face down on the tile.

Then she said something out loud into an empty house, and it had nothing to do with her body. She said: I should have known better than to write it in pen.

That right there is the part I want to sit with, because I think it is your part too. It is not the pain that has done the deepest damage. It is what the pain has taught you about hoping. Somewhere along the way your body started charging you a fee for every good week, and you have quietly decided to stop paying it. You do not write things in pen anymore. You say maybe. You keep the good news to yourself for a few days to see if it holds. And when someone prays over you now, there is a small, tired part of you standing off to the side with its arms folded, already bracing for the bill.

What the flare has actually been attacking

I want to say something plainly, because plain is all I have ever been any good at.

The flare has not only been coming for your body. It has been coming for your hope, and it has been winning there for longer, and that is the wound almost nobody asks about. People ask about your sleep. People ask about the new medication. Nobody asks what it does to a person to be disappointed by their own body, on a schedule, for years.

So let me say the low place out loud before I say anything else.

You are tired in a way that sleep does not touch. You have become an expert in a subject you never wanted to study. You know the names of things you cannot pronounce and the exact hour of the day it gets worse. You have watched the good weeks arrive and you no longer trust them, because trusting them is how it gets you. You have prayed and gotten up off your knees the same, more times than you can count, and somewhere in there you started praying smaller so it would hurt less when nothing changed. And on the worst nights you have wondered whether God got tired of the same request from the same person, the way you would be tired of it if it were somebody else asking.

Hear me. He did not get tired of you. Not once. Not on the sixth year of it. Lamentations 3:22 says His mercies are new every morning, and that includes the mornings you have stopped counting, and it is His Spirit, not my sympathy, that carries a line like that onto a bathroom tile at twenty to midnight.

I want you to look at how Matthew describes what Jesus actually did with His days.

And Jesus went about all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues, and preaching the gospel of the kingdom, and healing every sickness and every disease among the people.Matthew 9:35

Sit on the first three words. He went about. That is not a verse about one dramatic afternoon. It is a summary of a routine. Village, then the next village, then back around again. The same dusty roads, the same crowds, the same needs arriving over and over, and He kept going about. Nobody in those towns got healed because they caught Him on the one good day. He came back around. That was the whole rhythm of His life.

And a chapter earlier, a man with a skin disease that had emptied his life of every human being came and knelt in front of Him and said the most honest sentence a sick person ever prayed: Lord, if thou wilt, thou canst make me clean. He never doubted the power. He doubted the willingness. He had been outside the town long enough to assume he was somebody's exception.

Jesus reached out and touched him. That was already the miracle, and it happened before anything else did, because nobody had touched that man in years. And then He said two words that I would like you to carry out of this room with you.

I will.

Not maybe. Not we shall see. Not let us discuss whether you have earned it. Just, plainly, I am willing. That is the disposition of the One you are dealing with, and it has not changed since. Two words, written down, with no conditions hung off them anywhere, and the Spirit who put them there is not reading them to you as history.

Here is the second thing, and it is the one your tired part is standing off to the side about. This is not a story about people who lived a long time ago and happened to be in the right town. Miracles did not stop when the last apostle died. The Healer did not retire. Every argument I have ever heard for why the healing days are behind us is really an argument about our disappointment, not about His nature, and I would rather be honest about my disappointment than build a doctrine out of it.

And there is a smaller, sharper doubt underneath even that one, and it is yours specifically. It is not really does God heal. It is would God bother with this, with me, again, after all the times I have brought it. Friend, look at the verse right after that summary. When Jesus saw the crowds, He was moved with compassion for them, because they were worn out and scattered, like sheep with no shepherd. That is not a man scanning a crowd for the deserving. That is a shepherd's gut turning over at the sight of exhausted people.

You are not an exception on His list. You are the reason He is walking the road. That is Matthew 9:36, and His Spirit did not preserve it as background detail about a crowd in Galilee. He preserved it because the Shepherd is out on your road this week.

I have sat with a lot of people in a lot of kitchens, and I have noticed something about the ones who have been sick a long time. They apologize. They apologize for taking up the chair, for the state of the house, for bringing the same thing up again. Nobody with a broken arm apologizes for the arm. But give a body four years of something invisible and it starts to feel like a personality flaw, like a thing you are doing wrong on purpose, like an imposition on everyone who loves you.

Set that down. It was never true and it is not true this morning. There is no quota on how many times you may bring Him the same body. He is not rationing His attention and He has not moved on to more promising cases. The going about was never a favor He was doing you. It is what He is like.

Hear this too, because it matters and I will not skip it: receiving from God has never meant walking away from the people He put in your care. Keep the appointment. Keep taking what you have been given to take. Wisdom and faith have never once been enemies, and no honest word about healing asks you to gamble with the body you are asking Him to mend. Colossians 4:14 calls Luke the beloved physician, and the Spirit who carried that letter never asked him to put the bag down.