He Felt All Of It And Did Not Call It Light

The window seat is the good spot in the whole apartment, which is not saying much, but it gets the sun from about three and it fits two if one of them sits sideways.

Three of them in it and around it, and a bag of something on the sill, and the sun coming across the buildings opposite.

Thirty-two.

Four years, and there is a thing she does that she has never told any of them, and it happens most days at around this hour.

She grades herself.

Not on how she coped, exactly. On how much it still hurt. Because somewhere along the way she picked up the idea, and she genuinely cannot tell you where, that a settled faith would change the reading. That a person who really trusted God would find the pain registering at four instead of eight. That if she were further along, she would be less bothered.

So she checks. Every day. And on the days when it hurts as much as it hurts, which is most days, she does not just have the pain, she also has the report about herself, and the report is filed daily.

If you have graded yourself on how much it still hurts, you know exactly what number you gave today, and you know you have never told anybody that you keep a number.

The word is endured and it was chosen about Him

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

What this costs is not the four years. It is the second file. It costs you the ordinary right to be in pain without also being assessed, which nobody should have to lose. It costs the window seat at three in the afternoon, which is the good spot and which is where the grading happens. It costs you a number every day. And it costs you an idea you cannot even source, which arrived from somewhere and has been running your interior life ever since.

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 four 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 daily report has gone somewhere darker, as far as thinking these three would have easier afternoons without the whole business of you, tell one living person today. Your doctor, one of the two on the window seat, or a crisis line where you live, 988 by call or text in the United States and its equivalent wherever you are. Scripture asks nobody to hold that alone, and the Holy Spirit has always moved through people who squeeze onto a window seat sideways.

Now, Hebrews 12, and read the verb the writer uses about Jesus.

Looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith; who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God.Hebrews 12:2

Endured the cross.

Now hold that up against your idea. Your idea is that a sufficiently settled faith reduces the reading. If that were true, then the person with the most settled faith who has ever lived would have had the lowest reading, and the writer of Hebrews would have had a different verb available.

He does not use a different verb. He says endured, which is a word that only makes sense about something that is genuinely being felt. You do not endure a four. Enduring is what a person does when the thing is at full strength and they stay in it anyway.

You are looking at the one person whose faith was perfect and the word used about Him is endured. Hebrews 12:2 chooses a verb that requires the pain to be real, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that word off a page and lays it on a window seat at three in the afternoon.

Now, the phrase in front of it, because people misread it constantly. For the joy that was set before him. Set before. It was in front of Him, not inside Him. The joy is described as a thing ahead, a thing He was going toward, and the enduring is what He did on the way, and the writer does not for one second suggest that the joy in front reduced the weight of the thing He was in.

You have a picture in which the joy ahead and the full weight of the present are both true at once. That is written into Hebrews 12:2, and His Spirit in you is the one who keeps a joy ahead from being converted into an anesthetic now.

Now let me be exact about what this does not say, because four years of good sentences have already been said in that apartment.

It does not tell you the pain is changing, and it makes no prediction about your body, and I will not make one, because what God does there is His, in His own way.

And it does not tell you faith does nothing. It does a great deal. What it does not do, on the evidence of the one perfect case in Scripture, is turn an eight into a four, and building your assessment of yourself on that assumption has cost you four years of daily reports.

You were never given a scale in Scripture on which the reading proves anything about you. Hebrews uses the word endured about the Son of God, and the same Spirit who inspired it is the one who carries that into a small room with the sun coming across the buildings.