Asking For My Own Body

Bethan can do it for anybody else without thinking and she cannot get the sentence out about herself.

She has prayed for a great many people over about fifteen years. She is the one people ask, in her circle, because she is unembarrassed about it and does not make a performance and does not need anything back.

And she has something of her own. It is not dramatic and it is not frightening, and it is chronic and it is genuinely wearing and it has been going on for six years.

She has never once asked plainly.

She has asked around it. She has asked for grace to cope with it, for patience with it, for it not to make her difficult to live with, for wisdom about what to do next. All of those are real prayers and she means them.

But the plain sentence, the one she would say without hesitation for anybody at her church, has never come out of her about her own body.

She has noticed. She is not unaware. And she has tried, twice, and both times something intervened before the end of the sentence and she found herself, without deciding to, converting it into one of the other ones.

She is thirty-eight.

And the reason she gives herself, when she looks at it, is something about proportion. There are people worse off. It is not serious. It seems a lot to bring.

She half believes that and half knows it is not the whole thing, and she has never got to the rest.

You may know that unfinished sentence.

Maybe you also ask for everybody else easily. Maybe yours also converts into something more modest before it gets out. And maybe you have also given yourself a reason about proportion and half believed it.

Paul is completely unembarrassed about a stomach

There is a sentence in a letter that sits in the middle of serious instructions about elders and widows and the ordering of a church, and it is about a young man's digestion.

Drink no longer water, but use a little wine for thy stomach's sake and thine often infirmities.1 Timothy 5:23

Read what is in there and what is not.

Thine often infirmities. Not one crisis. A recurring, ongoing, unglamorous complaint in a man who was leading a church, mentioned by name in a letter that was going to be read out.

And Paul's response is practical advice. Not a rebuke about faith. Not a suggestion that Timothy pray harder or examine himself. A plain, ordinary, physical recommendation, given warmly, in the middle of everything else, as though a leader having a persistent bodily problem is a completely normal item to address directly.

There is no embarrassment anywhere in that verse. Not in the writing of it and not, apparently, in the expectation of how it would be received.

And an ongoing unglamorous complaint is addressed plainly in Scripture without one word of embarrassment. The written word puts thine often infirmities in a letter meant to be read aloud and answers it with practical advice, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that reach a woman who cannot finish a sentence about her own body.

And healing is His and the asking is yours. The word treats a body as a plain matter to be spoken about rather than a thing requiring justification, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit rather than weighing your complaint against other people's.

And note what else that verse does, because it matters here. Paul tells him to take something. Nothing in this article and nothing in this category suggests that asking replaces the ordinary sensible things anybody would do about a body. Ask, and do those, and let the two sit alongside each other exactly as they do in that sentence.

The reason about proportion

Now the reason you give yourself, because it is doing real work and it is half true, which is the most durable kind of reason.

There are people worse off. True. There always are, for everybody, including the people worse off, and if that rule held then nobody would ever ask for anything except one person somewhere.

It is not serious. Also true, and irrelevant, because you would not apply that standard to anybody else. If a woman at your church described six years of exactly your thing you would pray for her without a flicker.

It seems a lot to bring. And there it is. That one is not about proportion at all. That is a sentence about what you are entitled to take up.

I do not know where you got it. Most people who have it got it early and cannot remember acquiring it. But it is the operative clause, and the other two are the respectable ones standing in front of it.

And you are not required to justify the size of it before you can ask. The word says be careful for nothing, but in every thing by prayer and supplication let your requests be made known unto God, and in every thing is doing the work in that sentence, and the Spirit is the one who makes it cover an unglamorous six years.

And nothing about you is under review for having something small and chronic. The word says there is now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and the Spirit supplies that to a woman who converts her own sentence into a more modest one without deciding to.

What the converting is

One observation, and then the small thing.

Both times you tried, the sentence converted before the end.

That is worth noticing as a mechanism rather than a failure. What converts a request into a humbler request mid-sentence is not modesty; modesty would let you finish and then be gracious about the answer. What does that is a rule about what you may take up, running fast enough to edit you in real time.

And a rule that edits you in real time has never been examined, because you have never once heard the full sentence out loud, including yourself.

And you are able to finish the sentence. The word has Paul name a recurring bodily complaint in writing, in a public letter, without a single qualifying clause, and the Spirit is the one who supplies the plainness that six years of converting has not.