Day One: The Body You Wake Up In

Before my feet ever touch the floor, I already know what kind of day I am going to have. I take the inventory in the dark. Where is the pain sitting this morning. Did the spasms come in the night. Is my stomach going to cooperate, or is it going to turn every plan on my calendar into a lie by ten o’clock. I have not prayed yet. I have not read a word of Scripture yet. I have already been handed a report I never asked for.

If you live in a body that has stopped taking orders, you know that inventory. Yours may be a different list. You may be counting the days since your last infusion, or testing whether your back is going to let you stand at the sink, or waking with the low dread of a condition that has no name yet and no end in sight. The list changes. The morning reckoning does not.

I want to name something on this first day, because it will follow us all month if we leave it alone. There is a temptation to treat that morning inventory as a spiritual failure. To believe that a stronger Christian would wake up singing, and that the fact you woke up counting means something has gone wrong with your faith. I have believed that. I have gotten out of bed already behind on the day and already guilty about it.

Look at what God put in His own hymnbook. Psalm 102 carries a title, and the title was not added by a modern editor trying to be helpful. It reads, “A Prayer of the afflicted, when he is overwhelmed, and poureth out his complaint before the LORD.” Then the prayer itself gets specific about a body. “My bones are burned as an hearth.” “My heart is smitten, and withered like grass.” “By reason of the voice of my groaning my bones cleave to my skin.”

God did not merely tolerate that prayer. He preserved it. He titled it. He placed it in the collection His people would sing together, which means He intended for it to be sung out loud by more than one sufferer in more than one generation. He built a form for the overwhelmed and left it in the middle of the book.

The psalm does not stay in that room. By verse twelve it turns, and the turn is the whole point: “But thou, O LORD, shalt endure for ever.” What it never does is pretend it started somewhere else. It does not skip the bones and the ashes to get to the enduring God. It walks the reader straight through the wreckage and out the other side, and both ends of that walk are inspired Scripture.

So here is what this month is going to be, and what it is not. It is not going to talk you out of your body. I am not going to hand you a verse as a distraction from what you already know is true about your condition, because a verse used that way is not doing what God gave it to do. We are going to say the hard things plainly. Identity. Fear. Guilt. The people who left. The days your body simply takes from you. And every one of those honest things is going to be set beside something truer, which is who God is and what is already yours in Christ.

Tomorrow morning the inventory will come again. Take it. But take it to Him instead of about yourself. There is a difference between a report you deliver to your own accusing heart and a complaint you pour out before the Lord, and the second one has a psalm number.