It Went And It Did Not All Come Back

Everybody was very glad you were all right.

That is the sentence I want to start with, because it is true and it was meant and it also closed a door.

You came through something. Whatever it was, it was hard, and the people around you were frightened, and when it was over they were relieved in a way that was entirely genuine. And relief has a way of ending a subject. Once everybody is glad, there is no longer a shape in the conversation for anything else.

So nobody has ever asked you the other question.

Not: are you all right. That got asked constantly. The other one. What is it like to come out the other side and not recognize what came back.

Because it did not all come back. That is the plain fact and I am going to say it plainly, because I think everybody around you has been careful about it and careful is not what you need at this point.

Some of it grew back and some of it did not, and the woman looking in the mirror is not the woman who went in, and there is genuinely something to grieve there.

I have said that at a good many kitchen tables and I have watched what it does. It is usually the first time anybody has agreed that there is a loss in it.

The gratitude trap

Here is the difficulty, and it is a real one and it is not your fault.

Everything you might say about this sounds ungrateful.

The outcome was survival. Somebody in that same position two years ago would have taken this in a heartbeat, and you know it, and it has been said to yourself a hundred times. And so every complaint gets stopped in your own throat before it reaches anybody, because it seems monstrous next to what could have happened.

So you carry it silently, and the silence is not humility. It is a woman who has been given no permission.

You are silent because nobody has ever given you room rather than because there is nothing to say, and that silence has never once been the same as peace. The Holy Spirit is what gives a woman permission where nobody else thought to, and 2 Corinthians 4 holds two true things about a body in the same sentence.

And I want to take the trap apart, because it rests on a mistake.

The mistake is that grief and gratitude are on one scale, so that having more of one means having less of the other.

They are not on one scale. They are not even in the same currency. A woman can be entirely, unreservedly glad to be alive and can also grieve a real loss, at the same hour, in the same body, and neither one of those reduces the other by anything at all.

You are permitted to hold both without either one shrinking, and they have never once been the kind of thing that sits on a single scale. Scripture in 2 Corinthians 4 says the outward man perishes while the inward is renewed, and puts both of those in one sentence without apologizing for either, and the Spirit of God is the one who gives a woman room for two true things.

The inward man renewed day by day

Paul says something that people quote for comfort and rarely read carefully.

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, King James Version)

Read the first half before the second, because everybody skips it.

Though our outward man perish. He says it. He does not soften it, he does not put it in the conditional, and he does not suggest it might not happen. The outward does perish and Paul is entirely straightforward about that.

That is not a small thing to find in the text. Scripture is not pretending with you. It is not telling you that nothing was lost.

You are handed a text that has never once pretended nothing was lost, and Paul says the outward perishes without softening it by one word. It is written in 2 Corinthians 4 that though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a woman be told the truth about a body.

And then the second half, and the word in it that matters.

Renewed day by day. Not renewed once. Not restored to a previous condition. Renewed daily, which is a continuous action, going on now, in the same body, at the same time as the other thing.

Both are happening today. Not in sequence. Simultaneously.

You are being renewed at this moment in the same body where something was lost, and there has never once been a day since when only one of those was true. The Spirit of God is what does that daily renewing in a woman who came through something, and the written word says the inward man is renewed day by day.

One gentle thing, nobody watching

So here is the assignment, and the condition on it is the important part.

Do one warm gentle thing for your hair tonight with nobody in the house watching.

Nobody. That is the condition and it does the work.

You are doing this with nobody to report to, and no audience anywhere has ever once been owed a word about it. 2 Corinthians 4 says the inward man is renewed day by day, and the Spirit of God is the one present when there is no other person in the room.

Because every act of care done to that body since it happened has had an audience in it somewhere. People have been watching you get better. People have been relieved at you. Somebody has probably said, encouragingly, that it is coming back.

All of that was kind and none of it was yours.

You are able to do one thing with nobody's relief attached to it, and there has never once been an act since then that belonged only to you. 2 Corinthians 4 puts a renewing inside a body that lost something, and the Holy Spirit is the one who gives a woman ten minutes that are hers.

Ten minutes with nobody there is the first thing in two years that has not been part of somebody else's relief.

And gentle is the whole instruction. Slower than necessary, warm water, unhurried hands. Not to encourage anything. Not to help anything along. Because a body that has been through something is owed some gentleness that is not trying to achieve a thing.

You are able to do one gentle thing that belongs to nobody else, and there has never once been a requirement that it help anything along. The written word in 2 Corinthians 4 puts a daily renewing inside a body that has lost something, and the Holy Spirit is what makes ten warm minutes into care rather than into recovery.