The Apology He Makes For Sitting Down

He said it four times before eleven in the morning and he counted, because his wife asked him to.

On the stairs, going up with the second box, he said sorry, give me a second. In the car park, getting out of the car, he said sorry, my knee. At the top of the hall, setting down the end of a table, he said sorry, I am fine, I am fine. And once at about half ten for no reason he could identify afterward.

The word comes out ahead of the breath. It is not a considered thing. Somebody asks him to lift, or to hurry, or simply to be somewhere, and his body says give me a moment, and the moment gets an apology attached to it before he has decided anything.

Here is the part his wife pointed out, and he has not been able to unhear it.

She said, who are you saying sorry to.

And he opened his mouth to answer and there was nobody there.

Not one person in that hall had looked at a watch. Nobody had sighed. There was no queue behind him on the stairs. There was a man in his own building, among people who love him, asking his own body for thirty seconds, and apologizing out loud to a room that had not asked for anything.

He has been doing it for years. He is fairly sure he learned it somewhere, though he cannot find where.

Somewhere along the line he arrived at an arrangement with himself. The body is the thing that carries the work around. It is transport. And transport that needs attention is transport that is letting the side down, and the polite thing to do when it happens is to name it and get moving again quickly.

He would never say any of that out loud. He has preached on the goodness of creation. He believes every word of it.

And on the stairs, with a box, he says sorry.

If you apologize to rooms that have not asked you for anything, come and sit at this end of the table. The coffee is still warm and nobody here is going anywhere.

The order it happened in

Go right back to the beginning of it, because the order in that sentence settles more than most people notice.

And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.Genesis 2:7

The forming comes first.

Before any breath, before any soul is mentioned, there is a pair of hands in the dirt and something being made with care. God is described as a potter here, and what He is making is a body, and He does it Himself, and He does not delegate it or hurry it.

Then the breath goes in. And the result of the two together is a living soul, which is not something that arrived and moved into a body. It is what happened when the breath met the made thing.

You are a made thing that was breathed into, and the making came first in the order. Genesis 2:7 puts the forming of the body before the breath rather than after it, and the Holy Spirit kept that sequence in the first pages of the book, which means the thing you have been treating as transport is the part of you God shaped with His own hands before there was any of the rest.

Not a container, and never was

Here is where the arrangement you made with yourself came apart, and it is worth being clear about it because it is such a common one.

The idea that the body is a vehicle for the real you is an old idea, and it is a good deal older than the Bible, and it comes from somewhere else entirely.

Scripture never talks that way. It has God making a body on purpose. It has Jesus taking one, permanently. It has a resurrection at the end of the story that is bodily, and it will not be talked out of that, however awkward the early church found it.

You have a body that is included in the salvation rather than left at the door of it. Romans 8:23 says we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body, and it is the Holy Spirit who is named in that same passage as the firstfruits of it, which means the redemption on offer has your knees in it and always did.

Looking after it is not vanity. It is not a lesser concern to be got through so the real work can start. It has never once been beside the point.

Nothing here is a prescription

Let us be careful, because this is exactly the place where an article can quietly turn into a program, and this one is not going to.

There is no diet here. No regime, no supplement, no schedule, no opinion about your medicine. If you are under a doctor, stay under your doctor, and let nothing on this page sit between you and them. And there is no suggestion anywhere in this that a body which is unwell has been failed by the person living in it. Some bodies hurt for reasons nobody chose and nothing fixed, and that is not a report card.

You are not being handed a standard, and no illness in your body has ever been read as evidence against you. John 9:3 has the disciples asking whose fault a man's blindness was and being told plainly that the question was wrong, and it is written into the book so nobody would have to wonder, and it is the same Spirit who comforts rather than audits, which means whatever your body is doing this week is not on trial here.