I Used To Do This All Day

He sat down on an upturned crate at half past two on Tuesday and did not get up for eleven minutes, and there was nobody about, and he was glad of that.

The job was not hard. That is what has been at him since.

It was the sort of thing he would have done between other things twenty years ago and not counted as a job at all. He would have done it before dinner and then done something else, and if you had asked him at six that evening what he had done that day he would not have mentioned it.

He is sixty-nine.

And he sat on that crate and did the arithmetic he has been avoiding since roughly the spring, which is that a day's work now takes what a morning used to, and that he has been quietly rearranging everything around that fact for about two years without ever saying it out loud, including to his son, who has noticed and has been kind about it in a way that makes it worse.

And here is the part that has actually been bothering him, and it is not the body.

He was brought up in a place where the two things ran together. A man's strength and a man's faith were spoken of in the same breath by people who did not think they were doing it. Standing firm. Running the race. Not growing weary.

So when a man of sixty-nine sits down on a crate for eleven minutes, some part of him that has been there since he was a boy reads it as a report on his soul.

And that is you on your own crate, or you would not still be reading.

Paul separates them in one sentence

Let me give you a verse written by a man who was physically wrecked and knew it, and watch what he does with exactly your problem.

So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day.2 Corinthians 4:16

Two selves. Named separately. Going in opposite directions at the same time.

Our outer self is wasting away. He does not soften it. Wasting away is a blunt phrase and he chooses it about his own body, in writing, to a church, and he does not treat it as something to be ashamed of or hidden.

Our inner self is being renewed day by day. Simultaneously. Not afterwards, not instead, not once the outer situation improves. Day by day, while the other thing is going on.

You are two things at once, and Scripture puts them in one sentence going in opposite directions. It is written that though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day (2 Corinthians 4:16). The Holy Spirit is the One doing the renewing, and it is not slowed by what a man's back will do at sixty-nine.

Now the thing you inherited, because it is the actual injury and it was handed to you kindly by people who meant well.

Standing firm. Running the race. Not growing weary.

Every one of those is a real phrase from Scripture and every one of them is about something other than physical stamina, and you know that if you look at them straight. Paul writes about running the race while describing himself as wasting away. He tells people not to grow weary in doing good while sitting in a prison.

The people who ran the two together in your hearing were not teaching you that on purpose. It came through the tone rather than the words, and you absorbed it at about nine years old, and it has been operating ever since without ever being examined.

You are not reading a report on your soul when you look at what your body will do. It is written that our inner self is being renewed day by day (2 Corinthians 4:16), and day by day is stated while the outer self is going the other way. The Holy Spirit did not tie His work in a man to the man's capacity for physical work.

And I want to say one more thing, and it is the plainest thing here.

Eleven minutes on a crate at sixty-nine, after a job that used to be nothing, is not a failure of anything. It is arithmetic. Bodies do this and every body that has ever existed has done it, including the bodies of people you have admired all your life who never mentioned it to you either.

You are dwelt in on the crate, at half past two, in the eleventh minute. It is written that the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you (Romans 8:11), and there is no clause about what the body He dwells in can still lift. The Holy Spirit was on that crate with you, and He was not waiting for you to get up.

And say this plainly with me before we go on. If the tiredness has gone further than tiredness, if there have been thoughts about not being here, tell somebody this week and tell your doctor. In the United States you can call or text 988 at any hour. Anywhere else, your local line, and one person who knows your name. That is not weakness in a man. It is the same sense that makes you get a machine looked at before it fails.