The Body That Will Not Do What It Did

She was a woman who was never in a room for very long.

That is how her mother describes her before, and it is accurate. She taught high school and she coached, and she was the one running the length of a field at half past four with a whistle in her mouth, and on a Saturday she was on a hill somewhere, and she once did a half marathon in the rain on almost no training because a friend backed out and somebody had to use the number.

That was four years ago.

It is not one thing. It is a name for a condition that came on over about eighteen months and did not go away and is not going to. It took the running first. Then it took the coaching, because you cannot coach from a chair for a whole season. Then, over about a year of trying, it took the teaching, because a full timetable turned out to be past the edge of what her body would do.

And now there is a sunroom, and a daybed, and a pair of shoes under a chair that she has not thrown out and does not wear.

Here is what she has never been able to say to anybody.

I am grieving a person, and the person is me.

Not her health, exactly. Not her career, exactly. A whole self. The woman who took the stairs two at a time and shouted across a field and was known, in that whole town, as the one who was always moving.

People do not know what to do with that. They are kind about the illness. They ask how she is feeling, which is a medical question, and she gives a medical answer. Some of them still send her things about treatments.

But nobody has ever said, the woman you were is gone, and that is a death, and I am sorry.

Because who says that? There is no card for it. And she is right there, alive, in the sunroom, so what exactly would anybody be grieving.

If any woman has looked at a pair of shoes under a chair, stay with me. There is a sentence in the fourth chapter of Second Corinthians that says the hard half out loud and does not soften it.

Paul says perish and he does not take it back

Here is the verse, and I want to hold on the first half of it for a while, because that is the half nobody preaches.

For which cause we faint not; but though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day.2 Corinthians 4:16

Perish. That is a hard word and it is Paul's own. The Greek carries the sense of being corrupted, worn out, decaying. It is not a gentle word about aging gracefully.

And here is the thing to notice. He states it as a fact. He does not argue with it. He does not spiritualize it away. He does not tell the Corinthians that the outward man only appears to be perishing, or that faith exempts anybody from that clause.

He wrote that in a letter in which he also lists what happened to his body: beaten five times, stoned once, shipwrecked three times, and a thing in his flesh that he asked God three times to take away and God did not.

That is the man writing about the inward man being renewed. He is not writing from a healthy body and he never pretends to be.

You are described accurately by that verse rather than exempted from it, and you were inside it through every one of the four years. 2 Corinthians 4:16 is the written word saying the outward man perishes and refusing to soften it, and the Spirit who breathed that line is in a sunroom in the late afternoon with a woman whose shoes are under a chair.

Now the second half, and I want to be careful, because it gets misused.

The inward man is renewed day by day. That is present tense and it is ongoing and it is happening. But look at what it does not say. It does not say the outward man gets renewed. It does not promise a reversal of the first clause. It does not put a date on anything.

Paul holds both halves at once, in one sentence, without letting either cancel the other, and that is exactly the arrangement she has been trying to find for four years.

You have a renewal going on in you that is not conditional on your body doing anything, and you were being renewed on the days you could not get off that daybed. 2 Corinthians 4:16 puts the inward renewal in the present tense right beside the perishing without one word of contradiction, and the Holy Spirit does not wait for a body to cooperate before He works.

What you lost was a person and it deserves the word

Now let me itemize, because nobody has and it is the reason none of this can be said.

She lost the running. That is the one everybody would understand and it is not the biggest.

She lost being the person other people counted on to be moving. There is a difference between not being able to run and no longer being the woman who runs, and only one of those is medical.

She lost a room full of fifteen year olds who thought she was the best thing about that school.

She lost the shape of a week, and the shape of a September, and the shape of a Saturday, all three of which she had held since she was twenty two.

She lost the future she had assumed. There was a version of her fifties in which she was still out there with a whistle, and that version does not exist, and nobody holds a service for a version of a person.

And she lost the ordinary experience of being in a body that simply does what it is told, which is a thing nobody notices they have until it goes.

That is six things, and every one of them is real, and the reason nobody has offered her sympathy for any of them is that they are all bundled inside a word, illness, that people treat as a medical matter rather than a bereavement.

You are grieving six real losses and not being dramatic about a diagnosis, and you were carrying all six of them for four years without a name for any of it. Ecclesiastes 3:4 says there is a time to weep and a time to mourn and puts no condition on it about whether anybody has been buried, and the Spirit of God does not compress a woman's losses into one clinical noun.

Nobody gets to decide the size of this from outside

Now let me say the thing about the ranking, because it is happening and she has felt it.

There is a way people respond to this that is meant kindly and lands as a measurement. At least it is not terminal, they say. At least your mind is intact. Plenty of people would trade.

Every one of those, said out loud or merely implied by a change of subject, does the same job: it puts her loss on a scale next to somebody else's, and it tells her the number is too low to justify what she is feeling.

That scale does not exist anywhere in Scripture.

There is a verse about tears and a bottle, and there is no threshold in it. There is a psalm where a man says his bones are consumed and his strength faileth, and nobody in the text asks him whether other people have it worse. There is a prophet who sat under a tree and asked to die, and God sent food and sleep rather than perspective.

You are permitted to grieve this at exactly the size it actually is, and you were permitted to on every one of the four years. Psalm 31:10 has a man saying his strength faileth and his bones are consumed with no comparison offered anywhere near it, and the Holy Spirit does not measure one person's loss against somebody else's before deciding whether to sit down.