The Body You Have Been Apologizing For

She has the apology ready before she reaches the door. Nobody taught it to her. She has simply said it so many times that it comes out ahead of hello. Sorry, I am slow on stairs now. Sorry, I need the chair with the arms on it. Sorry, I have to sit down for this bit. She says it laughing, so that nobody in the room has to carry the weight of it, and everybody laughs along with her, and it works beautifully, and it costs her something every single time.

Four years ago that same body went up those stairs with a child on one hip and the shopping in the other hand and did not think about it once. It was never the thing she was proud of. It was just the thing she lived in. Then came the appointment, and the second appointment, and the word she now has to spell for people. And somewhere in the months after, without deciding to, she stopped introducing herself and started introducing her condition, with an apology stapled to the front of it like a receipt she has to show at the door.

Here is what nobody at that gathering can see. She rehearsed it in the car. She sat outside with the engine off and worked out the lightest possible way to say I cannot do that anymore, so that it would land as a joke and not as a burden. That is not vanity. That is a woman managing everybody else's comfort with the last of her strength, on a day when she had very little strength to begin with.

And now I stop talking about her, because you already knew who she was. It is you. It is you in the car with the engine off. It is you who says sorry to a doorway, sorry to a friend, sorry to your own husband at the end of a day you fought hard to finish. Beloved, come and sit down. I am not going to ask you to explain anything to me. I want to talk to you about the apology, because you have been paying for it for a long time and it was never yours to pay.

You started saying sorry for a body that has done nothing wrong

Let me name it plainly, because being seen in the low place is where this starts.

There are clothes at the back of your wardrobe you cannot look at. There are invitations that get declined before they are finished being offered. There is a version of you in photographs that nobody gets shown anymore. There is pain with no visible marker on it, so it has to be proved, over and over, to receptionists and relatives and sometimes to yourself. And there is a quiet, grinding sentence underneath all of it that says: I am the inconvenient one now.

You are not the inconvenient one. You are a woman, or a man, in a body that changed, and you have been treating that change as a moral failure. It is not. A body that hurts is not a body that sinned. A body that slowed is not a body that quit. You did not fall out of favor with God when you fell out of step with your old self. That is not my opinion of you. It is what 1 Peter 2:24 settled, and His Spirit is pressing it into the exact part of you that you have learned to hide.

Look at what our Lord actually did with a body.

He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed.1 Peter 2:24

He took a body. Not a symbol of one. A real one, that got tired at a well at noon and slept through a storm because it needed the sleep. He carried our sickness in it. And when He came out of that tomb, He did not come back polished and unmarked. He came back with the marks still in Him, and He showed them to a doubting friend on purpose, and nobody in that room thought the marks made Him less. They were the proof He was the same one they loved. And the same Spirit who brought Him up out of that tomb with the marks still in Him is living in you, which tells you exactly what God reckons a mark is worth.

Your marks do not make you less either. Say that slowly, and say it twice, because you have been living under the opposite sentence for a long time and one hearing will not shift it. The written word calls His wounds the place your healing came from. It has never once called yours a disgrace.

I keep the night watch, so I know something about how this works after midnight. The hours between twelve and three are when the accusing voice does its clearest work, and it never comes shouting. It comes reasonable. It sounds like arithmetic. Less use than before. More work than before. They are being kind about it, but they have noticed. And because the tiredness is real, and because the pain is real, it sounds like honesty instead of what it is. Beloved, that voice is not doing an audit. It is doing a demolition, and it has been using your own vocabulary to do it.

Now I have to carry you across two things, and I am not going to argue you into either of them, because nobody was ever argued into healing. God still heals. He has not retired, He has not lost interest, He did not stop somewhere in the first century and hand the rest of us a pamphlet. The same compassion that stopped a crowd for one woman who had been bleeding twelve years is moving in the room you are sitting in right now. That crowd is still written down where anybody can read it, and the Spirit of God has not changed His mind about a single person in it, or about you at the back of it.

And the second one, which is harder for you: this is for you. Personally. Not for the strong ones. Not for the ones with the clean history and the tidy prayer life. You have been assuming you are somewhere near the back of a very long line, and that is the assumption I have come to break, because heaven does not run a queue and there is no number in your hand. Scripture put your name in that sentence rather than your category, and His Spirit reads it out that way every single time.

And I am not trading in guarantees. Your welcome at His feet does not depend on the answer arriving today, and neither does your dignity. Keep your appointments. Take what your doctor put in your hand. Faith has never once been proved by neglect, and nobody here is asking you to test God with your health.