Your Body Has Been Through Enough

He is on the other side of it now, which everybody keeps saying to him as though it were the finish line, and it is not.

The treatment ended in the spring. The scans are what everybody hoped they would be and he is grateful in a way that he cannot really say out loud without his voice going, and he means every bit of it.

And he is tired in a way he had no vocabulary for before this year.

Not sleepy. It is not that. It is that there is nothing spare in him. He can do a day, mostly. He cannot do a day and then something else. His wife has learned to read it off his face at about four in the afternoon and she has stopped asking whether he is all right, which he is grateful for and which also tells him something.

His doctor was direct about food, and about not going without, and about the body being in the middle of a long rebuild whatever the scans say.

And a good man at church, who prayed for him faithfully through the whole of it and rang every week, said last Sunday: now let us fast about the rest of it.

He said we could look at that. And what he felt, standing in a hallway with his coat on, was the plain physical fact of a man being asked for something he does not have.

If your body has already given everything it had this year, come and sit down out here in the good chair.

Nobody is asking you for anything

Let us settle it before another word, because a man in your condition should not have to read four paragraphs to find out.

Nothing on this page is going to suggest you take one more thing off yourself. Not a little. Not to see how you get on. Your doctor is right, the rebuild is real whatever the scans say, and the answer is no, and nobody here is disappointed about it.

You are not being asked for anything, and there is nothing outstanding from you. That is not a courtesy extended to a tired man on a porch. It is written that the Lord looketh on the heart (1 Samuel 16:7), and the Holy Spirit is the one who was in that hallway on Sunday and knew exactly what was happening in you while a good man was being kind.

Which direction the giving runs

There is a verse in Isaiah that settles who is supposed to be supplying what, and it is worth reading slowly because the traffic all goes one way.

He giveth power to the faint; and to them that have no might he increaseth strength.Isaiah 40:29

Look at the two descriptions. The faint. Them that have no might.

That is not a description of people who are holding a bit back. That is a description of the end of a man's resources, and it is the exact category Isaiah names as the recipient. And both verbs belong to God: giveth, and increaseth.

Nothing in that sentence is asked of the faint man. He is not told to summon something first, and there is no clause where he contributes and God tops it up. The whole transaction runs downhill toward him.

You are precisely the person that verse names, and the giving is entirely from His side. I am not saying that to soften a hard year: it is the plain grammar of the sentence and who it is addressed to (Isaiah 40:29), and it is His Spirit, not this page, who makes it something you can lean on at four in the afternoon.

And nothing has been lost to you

Here is a thing worth saying plainly to a man who has lost a fair amount this year.

Going without food was never a rank and never a qualification, so this year has not taken it from you, because there was nothing of that kind there to take. There is no shelf you have been moved down to.

You have lost nothing at all in this, and nobody is above you anywhere. Scripture says God is no respecter of persons (Acts 10:34), and it is His Spirit who makes that a fact about your own hallway rather than a doctrine you would nod at.

And nobody here is going to hand you a smaller thing to attempt so you feel like you are still in it. That would agree with the idea that there is something you are outside of, and you are not.

Now the rule this site says on every single page. Some folks must not go without food at all, and being one of them takes nothing off you. Illness, treatment, medication, diabetes, pregnancy, any hard road with eating, being underweight, frail, unwell, elderly, or simply not sure: talk to your doctor and let what they say be the answer. You are not one step further from God on account of a doctor's advice. The word says the Lord is good to all, and his tender mercies are over all his works (Psalm 145:9), and the Holy Spirit has never once come in a smaller measure to a man because of his body.

And if this week has more in it than a page can hold, if you are frightened for yourself, put this down and call a real person: your doctor, a counselor, a crisis line, and the emergency services if you or anybody near you is in danger tonight. That is not going around God. That is help He put in this world on purpose.