The Glass She Kept Walking Past

There is a glass on the counter in that flat that she fills every morning and drinks about a third of.

It sits there all day. She walks past it eleven, twelve times. It is not that she does not want it. It is that there is always something between her and it, and by evening it has gone flat and she tips it away and fills it again in the morning.

She would tell you that is a silly thing to write an article about, and she would be right, and it is not what the article is about.

Here is what it is about.

She prays for everybody in that building. Four floors, and she knows what is going on with most of them, and there are people on the second floor who would tell you, if you asked, that they are still in their flat because of her.

She is up at half five. She is out at people's doors. She sits with a woman on the ground floor twice a week who does not have long and knows it.

And somewhere in all of that, without ever once deciding it, she started thinking of her own body as the van.

Not in those words. She would never say that. But the shape of it is this: her body is the thing that gets her to the people who need her, and its condition is a logistical matter, and the actual work happens somewhere else entirely.

She noticed it a few weeks ago, walking past that glass for the ninth time in a day, and she stopped in her own kitchen and thought: I would not let anybody in this building treat themselves the way I treat this.

If you have been treating yourself as transport, come and sit down and have some tea. Nobody is going to tell you what to eat.

The word He chose for a body was a temple

Paul writes something to a church that was thinking about bodies in exactly that way, and the word he picks is doing all the work.

What? know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own?1 Corinthians 6:19

He could have said the body matters. He could have said look after it. He says temple, which in that world was not a metaphor for something important. It was the place God had said He would actually be.

And then he names who lives there, and it is not you.

You are the dwelling place of the Holy Spirit, and that is a description of your body rather than of your feelings about it. 1 Corinthians 6:19 puts the Spirit inside the physical rather than alongside it, which means the thing you have been treating as the van is the address.

That is the whole teaching and everything else follows from it.

Kindness, not a regime

Now let me be careful, because this is exactly the point at which a piece like this usually turns into instructions, and I am not going to do that to you.

You are not going to be told what to eat. Nothing here is going to suggest a way of living, a thing to give up, a thing to take, or a view about anybody's medicine. This site does not know your body and a real person acts on what they read, so it will not pretend otherwise. Whatever your doctor has told you stands, entirely, and nothing in this article touches it.

And if you are ill, or tired in a way that does not lift, or living inside a body that is not doing what it used to do, hear this before anything else: you are not being told that a better standard of care would have saved you from any of it. Psalm 103:14 says He knows our frame and remembers that we are dust, and it is the Holy Spirit who holds a person inside a body that is failing them, which means nothing here is a verdict on the state you are in.

What is on offer is much smaller and it has no rules attached.

One kindness. Whichever one is possible today.

You have permission to be kind to yourself in one small physical way, and it is not vanity and it is not beside the point. 1 Corinthians 6:20 says therefore glorify God in your body, and it puts the body inside the worship rather than outside it holding the coat, and it is His Spirit who makes an ordinary glass of water something other than housekeeping.

And here is the thing that undoes the van. You have been carried by God in the same body you have been treating as equipment, and He has been in it the whole time. Isaiah 46:4 says even to your old age I am He, and to gray hairs I will carry you, and it is His Spirit who does that carrying, which means the transport has never actually been you.