When the Flesh Fails

In March her body stopped doing what it had always done and it has not started again.

She is thirty-four. She was the one who organized things. There is a photograph from January of her halfway up a hill with four other people, and she looks at it sometimes and it is not painful in the way people assume; it is stranger than that. It looks like a photograph of somebody she used to be introduced to at parties.

Since March: mostly the bedroom. Some days the sofa, which counts as an outing. A diagnosis that took eleven weeks and then turned out to be a description rather than a plan.

And people are kind. That is the difficult part. They are genuinely, exhaustingly kind, and about once a week somebody says something with the word blessed in it.

You are still so blessed. Count your blessings. God has blessed you with such good friends.

And she smiles, because they mean it and because they have driven over, and then when the door shuts she lies there and the word sits in the room with her like a coat somebody left behind, and it does not fit anything she can see, and she cannot say it, and she has begun to feel that not being able to say it is one more thing wrong with her.

The verse says the flesh fails and does not take it back

My flesh and my heart faileth: but God is the strength of my heart, and my portion for ever (Psalm 73:26).

Read the first half again, on its own, and notice that Scripture is willing to say it.

My flesh and my heart faileth.

Not: my flesh is being refined. Not: my flesh is failing but really this is a gift. Fails. Present tense. Stated as a fact, without softening, by a man who is not being told off for saying it.

The Bible is not embarrassed about a body that stops working, and it does not rush to explain it, and nowhere in that psalm does anybody suggest the failing is secretly good.

You are allowed to say the true thing about your body and nobody is going to correct you. That is what the first half of the verse does, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an honest sentence a safe one, because Scripture says He searches all things and knows what is in a person, which means there is nothing to manage in front of Him.

The word in the room

Now let me say something about what people are doing when they say blessed at you, because you have started to feel like the problem and you are not.

They are frightened. Not of you; of the situation. A body that stops for no manageable reason is frightening to everybody who has one, which is everybody, and blessed is a word people reach for when they need a situation to be alright faster than it is.

That is not cruelty. It is fear wearing a kind face, and it is why the word arrives at you rather than about you.

So when it does not fit, that is not a failure of your faith. It is an accurate report. The word, as they are using it, means the year has been good, and the year has not been good.

You are not failing at anything by being unable to say a word that was aimed wrongly. The word says weep with them that weep (Romans 12:15), which is what people actually need and what is hardest to do, and the Holy Spirit is called the Comforter, which is a word about presence in a thing rather than about a reinterpretation of it.

Where the psalm puts the blessing

Here is the whole of it, and it is why this verse and not another one.

The psalm does not move the failing. It leaves it exactly where it is and adds a second clause: but God is the strength of my heart, and my portion for ever.

Portion is an inheritance word. It means the share allotted to a person. And what the man is saying is not that his body has become his portion, or that his health is, or that his year is. God is.

Which puts the thing he actually has somewhere his body cannot reach and cannot spend.

You have a portion that your body has not touched. Scripture puts the failing and the portion in the same sentence without resolving the first into the second, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an inheritance real to somebody lying down, because He is called the earnest of that inheritance, which is a guarantee about a thing not yet fully in hand.

And I am not going to oversell this, and I am not going to do what the word in the room did. Nothing here says the year was good. Nothing here says your body improves and nothing here explains why March happened, because I do not know and neither does anybody who has told you. What is settled is that the psalm says both halves out loud, and you are allowed to say both halves too.