The Body That Stopped Asking for Food

The kitchen scale sits on the counter beside the kettle, and it has been there long enough now that nobody moves it to wipe underneath.

Marguerite steps on it at twenty past six, the way she has every morning since the spring, because the nurse asked her to write the number down. The number is smaller again. Not by much. By enough. She writes it in the little notebook with the elastic band around it, closes the notebook, sets the kettle going, and then stands with both hands flat on the counter waiting for the water, because standing costs something now that it did not used to cost.

Her daughter cooks on Thursdays. That is the arrangement, and it is a good arrangement, and Marguerite is grateful for it in a way she does not know how to say. Thursday there is a casserole in a blue dish. She eats four forkfuls and says it is lovely, and it is lovely, and after four forkfuls her body simply closes like a shop at five. Not nausea exactly. Not pain. A door coming down. Her daughter watches the plate the way people watch a clock in a waiting room, and neither of them says anything about it, and both of them are saying nothing about the same thing.

The worst part is not the weight. Everybody thinks it is the weight. The worst part is that she cannot remember the last time she was hungry. Hunger used to be something that happened to her without being asked, a small honest signal from a body that wanted to stay. Now there is nothing in that place. She has gone looking for it. She has stood in front of the open fridge at eleven at night trying to want something, anything, and found the light and the cold air and no answer at all.

She has done everything she was told. The appointments. The tests with the long names. The tablets in the plastic organiser with the days of the week printed on the lid. She keeps every one of them. She is not a woman who quits.

And this is where it stops being about Marguerite, so I will stop pretending it is not.

You know the scale. You know the notebook. You know what it is to be asked how you are doing and to say fine, because the true answer takes twenty minutes and ends with everyone in the room upset. You have watched your own body go somewhere without you. You cannot follow it there. You cannot call it back. And the people who love you keep setting food in front of you as though the food were ever the problem.

You stood in front of that fridge. You wanted to want it.

And nothing came.

What is left of you is still all of you

Here is the pit, and I am not going to walk around it to get to something nicer.

A body that has stopped asking for food takes more than food away. It takes the ordinary. It takes birthdays and Sunday dinners and the small pleasure of being fed by somebody who loves you. It takes your reflection, because the person in the mirror keeps getting further from the one you remember. And it takes something quieter than all of that, something you may never have said out loud: the feeling that you are becoming less of a person. Less to work with. Less for anyone, including God, to do anything with.

That is the lie in the room, and it is a big one, and it is a very old one. Nothing written anywhere in Scripture measures a person by what is left of them, and His Spirit did not come into that kitchen to read the number off the scale beside the kettle.

Because if the amount of you determined the amount God could reach, then the sickest person in the world would be the furthest from Him, and the whole of Scripture goes the other way. He goes toward the ones who cannot come. Every single time.

Hear this in its own weight.

He sent His word and healed them, and delivered them from their pits of destruction.Psalm 107:20

Look at what He sends. Not a diet. Not a program. Not a stronger effort from a person who has no strength left to give. He sends His word, and the word goes where nothing else can get to, and it arrives in the pit rather than shouting down into it from the edge.

You have been trying to climb out with a body that will not co-operate. He is not standing at the top waiting for you to manage it. Psalm 107:20 says He sent it, and the sending is His own movement and never yours, and His Spirit is what brings it down to the floor of the pit where you actually are.

And while I have your attention, let me say one plain thing, once, and then leave it alone. Keeping your appointments is not a lack of faith. Taking what has been prescribed to you is not a lack of faith. Eating through a tube, drinking the supplement you hate, letting the nurse write down the number, none of that is a lack of faith. God put those hands in your life. Trusting Him and taking the tablet are the same movement, not two competing ones, and anybody who has told you otherwise was not carrying what you are carrying.