The Bag With My Name on It

The ticket machine gives her number forty one and the screen says thirty eight, and she takes her place by the rack of reading glasses the way she has taken it on the last Tuesday of every month for longer than she likes to count.

The pharmacy is busy in the way it always is at nine thirty: a man with a stroller, a lad in a high visibility vest with a prescription folded small, an old couple sharing one chair between them by turns. She knows the pharmacist by her first name and the pharmacist knows hers, and in about ten minutes a white paper bag will come over the counter with her name on the label and the same question, anything else for you today, and she will say no thank you, and go. Same as last month. Same as next month. This is not a crisis. Nobody would stop her in the street. It is her life, in a hundred small arrangements nobody sees: the getting up that takes longer, the things she does not do any more, the way she plans a Tuesday around a paper bag. It does not end. And she has made her peace with that, mostly, on most days, the way you make your peace with weather.

Then the two women behind her start talking, not loudly, and she is not listening, and then she is. Somebody at their church. A prayer meeting. Something dramatic, sudden, everybody in tears, a story that has already been told from the front twice. And it is a lovely story, and she is glad, and she means that. And she stands there by the reading glasses with number forty one in her hand and feels the thing she has never said out loud, which is that God seems to come for the crisis and the story, and she is neither. She is a woman who will be back here on the last Tuesday of next month. There is nothing to tell from the front. And underneath the gladness for a stranger, quieter, is the thought that a God who comes for the dramatic days must have very little reason to come to this counter.

Thirty nine. Forty. She moves up one, past the plasters, and thinks: nobody prays for the person who is just always like this.

That line is yours. You know your own bag with your own name on it, and you know exactly what it is like to hear a story from the front and stand there being not a story. Stay with me. I want to show you the verse with the word daily in it, because it was written for a woman in a line.

Day by day, He said

Here is the first thing, and it is a matter of what the psalm actually says before it is a matter of comfort. David wrote a long psalm about God going out in front of His people, and in the middle of it, between the mountains and the chariots, he stops and says this small thing:

Blessed be the Lord, who daily bears us up; God is our salvation.Psalm 68:19

Daily. Not at the crisis. Not at the dramatic turn. Not on the day that gets told from the front. Daily, which is the least dramatic word in the language, the word for Tuesdays and paper bags and getting up slowly. He bears us up daily. And see who is doing the verb, because it is not you: He bears. The psalm does not say He bears us up daily until the healing comes and then stops, and it does not say He bears us up daily as a consolation for the ones He is not going to heal. It says who He is, and He is the God of the daily.

You are carried on the last Tuesday of the month, in the line, by the reading glasses, exactly as much as anybody was ever carried on the day that made a story. I am not saying that to make you feel better about a counter. I am reading you the word daily out of the written word, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a verse David wrote and puts an arm under a woman with number forty one in her hand.

He heals, and the result is His, and neither of those cancels the other

Now let me say the thing this whole site says on every page, because it is owed to you plainly and not slid past. God heals. That is not a slogan and I am not going to soften it: it is what the Scriptures say He is and does, and what Jesus did all through the Gospels, and I hold it as true today as I hold the sunrise. And I do not promise you the result. I cannot, and nobody who loves you can, because we declare the finished word and He sends the current, and He is not on my clock or yours. Both of those are true at the same counter. He heals; and what happens in your body is His and not mine to promise. A person who tells you the first without the second has sold you something. A person who tells you the second without the first has quietly stopped believing.

And hear this too, because it is the failure this domain is most likely to make and it usually arrives dressed as encouragement: none of this is your fault. Not your faith, not your words, not the years, not what is in the paper bag. Nothing on this page stands between you and the people who care for your body; keep bringing that body to God as well, both together, and let nobody tell you they are rivals, because Scripture never once did.

The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.Lamentations 3:22-23

You have new mercies for a morning that looks exactly like yesterday morning, because the newness is in His mercy and not in your circumstances. That is written by a man sitting in a ruined city with nothing changed around him, and it is His Spirit who makes a mercy new at nine thirty in a pharmacy, in a body that is not going to be a story, without asking the body to be different first.

Not a lesser emergency, and not a failure

Let us name the thing actually being carried in that line, because you deserve to hear it said back to you plainly. It is not the condition; the arrangements with that were made long ago and get made again every month. It is the quiet conclusion that the ordinary is off His list: that He comes for the crisis and the story, that a thing which is neither has been filed as either not serious enough for Him or gone on too long for Him, and that a woman who has not quite arrived at acceptance is failing at the one thing left to her.

I want to tell you as a woman who has kept watch through a great many ordinary nights: every word of that is wrong, and it is wrong from Scripture and not from my kindness. A condition that does not end is not a lesser emergency in His eyes; it is a life He is inside of, hour by hour, at the counter, at the kettle. It has not gone on too long for Him, because daily has no expiration date. Acceptance is not the goal and it is not a failure. The goal is Him, present in the ordinary hours, and a person is allowed to keep asking Him for the body and be carried in the same breath, the way Paul was told my grace is sufficient and went on being an apostle with the thing still in him.

The eternal God is your dwelling place, and underneath are the everlasting arms.Deuteronomy 33:27

You are on the everlasting arms right now, in the line, and they are underneath and not on a schedule. The word says underneath, which is where a thing sits that holds you every day rather than catches you on the bad ones, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes those arms a felt reality on a Tuesday, or an unfelt one, and they hold either way.

And one thing that is not about the counter. If the years have taken you somewhere darker than tired, tell one human being today, and if there is any danger reach the crisis line where you live; in the United States that is a call or a text to 988. Keep every appointment and every medicine you have been given. The God who hears you is not in competition with the people caring for your body.