There Is Nothing Wrong With Me

There is nothing to point at and that is the whole difficulty.

If there were a name for it you would have a sentence. People would know what to say. There would be a word, and the word would do most of the work of explaining, and you would be able to decline things without it becoming a small mystery.

Instead there is nothing. Everything comes back fine. You look fine. You are, by every available measure, fine.

And you cannot get up the stairs twice in a morning without sitting down, and you have not been able to for about a year, and there is no sentence for any of it.

So you have started saying I am just tired, which is not true and is the nearest available thing, and every time you say it you feel it shave something off you.

Here is what I want to say before anything practical, because I think it is the piece nobody has said.

Nothing that is true about your body requires a name in order to be true. The absence of an explanation is a fact about the state of human knowledge, and it is not a fact about you.

An angel touched him, and said, Arise and eat

There is a passage in Kings where a man is finished, and what he is given first is not a word from God.

And as he lay and slept under a juniper tree, behold, then an angel touched him, and said unto him, Arise and eat. (1 Kings 19:5, King James Version)

As he lay and slept under a juniper tree, an angel touched him and said to him, Arise and eat.

He is asleep under a tree having asked to die. And what arrives is not a rebuke, not an explanation and not a theological correction.

You have a passage where the first thing sent to somebody who is finished is food and sleep, and 1 Kings 19:5 has never once required a person to explain themselves before they are cared for. The angel touches him and says arise and eat, and the Holy Spirit is the one who deals with a body first when the body is where the trouble is.

You are able to see how much God declines to say in that scene.

Elijah has just said something dramatic and self accusing. There is a whole speech in it, and it invites an answer, and the answer does not come for two more sleeps and two more meals.

Nothing is explained. Nothing is named. The thing that happens is: sleep, food, a touch, more sleep, more food.

And afterward, considerably afterward, there is a conversation. But not first, and not as a condition of the care.

You are able to be dealt with before anything is explained, and 1 Kings 19:5 has never once made the explaining part of the treatment. The Spirit of God is the one who touches somebody and tells them to eat, and the passage puts the body first and the conversation much later.

The explaining is a second job

Here is the thing to put down, and it is separate from your energy entirely.

You have been doing two jobs. The first is living in this body. The second is making it comprehensible to other people, and the second one is exhausting.

You have been carrying a second task nobody assigned you, and 1 Kings 19:5 has never once put the burden of explanation on the person who is finished. It is written that an angel touched him and said arise and eat, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lifts the requirement to make sense to everybody.

Count the conversations. The one with your mother. The one at church where somebody asked how you were and you did the shortened version. The one where you declined something and had to construct a reason that would be accepted.

Every one of those takes something, and there are three or four a week, and none of them changes your energy by one unit in either direction.

And notice why you do it. Not because anybody demands it. Because an unexplained decline invites people to supply their own explanation, and the explanations people supply are worse than the truth.

That is real and I am not going to tell you to stop caring about it. What I am going to say is that the explaining is not a duty, it is a habit, and it is one of the more expensive things in your week.

You are able to decline something without producing a reason, and none of that has never once been owed to anybody. The Spirit of God is the one who cares for somebody before any explaining happens, and 1 Kings 19:5 begins with a touch and a meal rather than with a question.

Ten minutes, and no account of it

So here is the assignment, and the second half is the release.

Do ten minutes of something small with somebody, and let it be enough for today without explaining it to anybody.

You are able to do a small thing and let it stand without an account attached, and unexplained has never once meant unreal. It is written arise and eat, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present in a kitchen with two women and a pot of tea.

Something small. Standing in the kitchen moving your arms. Walking to the end of the hall and back three times. Whatever today has, at the size today has it.

And with somebody, because that is what this site is about and because the presence of a friend removes the need to describe anything, which is the second half of the point.

Ask somebody who does not need the explanation. There is one. There is always one, and you know exactly who she is, and she is the person who has never once asked you what is wrong.

Do ten minutes with her, and then let it be over, and do not tell anybody about it in order to demonstrate that you are managing.

You have a friend who has never asked for an account, and being with her has never once required you to produce one. First Kings 19:5 sends food and a touch to somebody with nothing to say for himself, and the Spirit of God is the one who is in that kitchen with both of you.