Fashioned Like His Own, Not Like Mine At Twenty

Under the vine, at the long table, with the lamps on and the plates being taken away and nobody in any hurry.

His nephew is telling a story with both hands. There is an argument about a football match from nine years ago that will not be settled tonight and was not settled last year.

He is fifty-four and he is enjoying it, actually enjoying it, and he is also doing the thing he does.

Which is looking at his nephew, who is twenty-two, and running a comparison. Not with envy. Nothing so simple. He is measuring the distance between what that body does without thinking about it and what his body now requires him to plan.

Eleven years since it started. Four since the second surgery.

And under the enjoyment, all evening, there has been a prayer he has prayed for eleven years without ever once examining the wording, which is: give it back. Make it like it was. Let me have that again.

He has never said it out loud at a table. He has prayed it in cars and in waiting rooms and once, badly, in a stairwell.

And tonight, with the plates going and the argument going, it occurs to him for the first time to wonder whether he has ever read anything in Scripture that promises that particular thing, or whether he made it up.

If you have a prayer you have prayed for years without reading its wording, you know it does not feel like a mistake, and you know you would not be able to say where you got it.

The pattern is a body, and it is not yours

Weigh it before anything, at its own size, because on this site the honest paragraph runs first and it never gets shortened to reach a better one.

What this costs is not comparison. It is the eleven years of a prayer with nowhere to land. It costs you the ordinary unthinking use of a body, which is a thing nobody notices they have until it is planned instead of done. It costs the stairwell. It costs you the specific tiredness of praying for something you cannot find in writing anywhere, which turns hope into a private administration. And it costs you an evening under a vine, half spent enjoying your family and half spent doing arithmetic across a table.

I am not calling that small and I am not putting it beside anybody else's, because on this site there is no ranking of what people carry and there never will be. Any word from God that needs your eleven years made lighter first is not one Scripture speaks and not one the Holy Spirit has ever carried.

And plainly, before we go on: if the arithmetic has gone somewhere darker, as far as thinking the family would have easier evenings without the whole business of you at the end of the table, tell one living person today. Your doctor, the nephew, or a crisis line where you live, 988 by call or text in the United States and its equivalent wherever you are. Scripture asks no man to hold that alone, and the Holy Spirit has always moved through people who pull up a chair.

Now, Philippians, and read what the pattern actually is.

Who shall change our vile body, that it may be fashioned like unto his glorious body, according to the working whereby he is able even to subdue all things unto himself.Philippians 3:21

Fashioned like unto his glorious body.

Not fashioned like unto your body at twenty-two. Not restored to a previous specification. The pattern named in that sentence is a particular body that a particular person is currently in, and Paul had seen it, and he does not offer any other reference point.

You are being fitted to a pattern that has never once been a younger version of yourself. Philippians 3:21 names Christ's own risen body as the model, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a sentence written to a small church and lays it on a man under a vine at the end of a meal.

Now, why that matters so much for a prayer prayed in a stairwell. Give it back is a request to go backward along a line you have already traveled. What Paul describes is not on that line at all. He is not talking about a repair to an earlier state. He is talking about a transformation into something that has never existed in your history, modeled on a body that walked out of a tomb and ate fish and was recognizably a person.

Your twenty-two year old body, wonderful as it was, was also going to end. It was on the same road. It is not the destination and it never was.

You have a future that is not a return, and nothing in Scripture ever promised you a return. That is written into Philippians 3:21, and His Spirit in you is the deposit on a change rather than the guarantee of a reversal.

Now let me be exact, because you have had eleven years of well meant things said in waiting rooms.

This says nothing about what your body does next month. Nothing. It does not promise you improvement, it does not promise you decline, and I am not going to predict either, because what God does in your body in this life is His, in His own way, and I will not stand in for Him at a table I am not sitting at.

And it does not tell you the prayer was wrong to pray. A man asking for his body back is doing something entirely human and God has never once been offended by it. What it does is show you where the promise actually is, so that eleven years of hope stop being administered privately with no text behind them.

You were never asked to hold a hope you had to invent. Scripture puts the pattern in writing and names it, and the same Spirit who raised Christ is the one who is described as doing the fashioning.