The Book Open to the Right Page

Third row from the back, left hand side, the same spot she has stood in since the year the roof was fixed.

The book is open at the right page. That part she still does perfectly. She finds it before the music starts, she folds the corner over so it will not slip, she holds it up at the height a person holds a book when they are singing out of it. Her mouth moves. Her chin lifts on the long notes. From behind you would say there goes a woman who loves this.

There is no sound coming out. There has not been for a while.

She could not tell you when it stopped, and she has tried to work it out, lying awake, the way you try to remember when you last saw a ring. It was not a decision. There was no morning where she stood there and thought, I am not going to sing today. Somewhere in a long stretch of months her voice went from full, to careful, to quiet, to shaped air, and now she stands in her spot and moves her mouth around the words and nothing comes out, and she has become extremely good at it.

She used to be the one people turned around for. Not showing off, nothing like that. She was just loud and glad and slightly ahead of the beat, and the woman in front of her used to laugh about it in the parking lot afterward. Nobody has turned around in a long time. Nobody has noticed. That is its own particular ache, and it is not the same ache as the first one.

And she has never told a living soul, because how do you say it. I have stopped singing. Out loud it sounds like nothing. It sounds like a woman complaining about a hobby when there are people in this building with real trouble. It sounds ungrateful. So she carries it by herself, on a Sunday, with the book open at exactly the right page.

That is you, perhaps, in your own spot, holding your own book. And the reason you have never said it out loud is that you have already decided it does not count. Nobody scans for this. There is no appointment for it, no form with a box for it, nobody has ever once asked you about it, and so you filed it under nothing to report and you went back to work.

The thing nobody scans for

Let me start by putting a name on it, because it has been going around unnamed and that is half of why it weighs what it weighs.

Something in you got taken. Not by anybody's fault and not as a punishment, and I am not going to tell you what it was for, because I do not know and neither does anybody else who has ever said that sentence to you. But something got taken in this season, and no test looks for it, no report mentions it, no one at any desk anywhere has ever asked you about it, and because nobody asked, you concluded it was not a real loss.

It is a real loss. God counts it. He counts the singing, and the laugh you used to have, and the phone calls you stopped making, and the way you used to be first out of the car. Those are not accessories. They are you, and He is not less interested in you than He is in the part of you a machine can photograph.

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

Now look hard at how that sentence is built, because everything depends on it. Paul says two things about the same man in one breath. Outward. Inward. He does not say the outward does not matter. He does not say he has stopped caring about it. He says both are real and both are happening, and he puts them side by side without either one canceling the other out.

You are a person God is working on in a place no machine has ever looked at. That is not my idea. 2 Corinthians 4:16 is written down, and it is the Holy Spirit who does renewing work in an inward man, quietly, on an ordinary Sunday, in the third row from the back.

Additional, and never instead

Now the hard part, and I want to be very careful with you here, because this is where this subject gets used as a lid.

Somebody has probably handed you that verse already. Kindly. In a doorway, or at the end of a phone call. And what they meant by it, whether they knew it or not, was: stop asking about your body, and be content with what God is doing inside you instead. Take that out of your ears. That is not what Paul wrote and it is not what I am saying to you.

The inward renewal is an and. It is never an instead of. If I offer you the inward man as a swap for the outward one, I have handed you a consolation prize with a bow on it and called it grace, and you would be right to be angry with me. You did not ask for a nicer inner life in exchange for a body. You asked about a body. You may keep asking about a body. The asking is not greed and it is not a failure to appreciate what you have.

So let me hold both, out loud, in one breath, because that is what this whole site was built to do. God heals. He heals bodies, plainly and physically, Scripture says so and I am not going to shrink that down to something safer just because it is easier to defend. And I do not promise you the result. Not for your body and not for your voice. I do not know what He is going to do, nobody honest does, and I am not putting a date or a guarantee on anything, because we say what He said and the current is His.

What I can tell you without a single hedge is what is written: the inward man is renewed day by day. Not maybe. Not if you do something first. Day by day, present tense, as an ongoing act of God on a person He is not finished with.

You are being renewed inwardly today, on a Sunday, whether or not one note came out of your mouth. That is written in 2 Corinthians 4:16, and it is the Spirit of God who does it and not the strength of a woman who has been holding a book up for eleven months.

And one more thing, and I am not going to bury it politely at the bottom. If this long stretch has taken you somewhere darker than tired, if you have caught yourself thinking that nobody would really miss the sound of you, tell one human being today. In the United States, call or text 988. Anywhere else, your own local crisis line, and one person who can sit with you tonight. A page cannot sit next to you in a parking lot. You deserve somebody who can, and going to find them is not weakness, it is sense.