Mortal Was The Word He Chose

The hall is still warm from three hundred people and somebody is stacking chairs at the far end without any urgency about it.

There is tea. There is always tea. Two women are laughing at the serving hatch about something that happened in the second song.

She stays back most weeks, partly because she likes it and partly because the walk to the bus is easier once the crowd has gone.

Forty-one years old. Eight years.

Tonight, during the prayer at the end, the man leading said something and she felt the thing she always feels. He prayed, beautifully, for the peace of everyone's hearts, and he prayed for the strength of everyone's spirits, and he prayed that nobody would be defined by their circumstances.

And under her breath, without deciding to, she prayed the other thing. The one she has been praying for eight years and has never once said out loud in a room.

Please do something about my body.

And then, immediately, the second thing, which arrives every single time like a hand over a mouth: which is small of me, and materialistic, and not what a mature Christian would be asking for, and I should want the peace.

She has been embarrassed by her own prayer for eight years.

If you have prayed something and then apologized for praying it, you know it happens in the same breath, and you know you have never told anybody the prayer or the apology.

He wrote mortal bodies and he could have written anything

Weigh it first and whole, because on this site the honest paragraph comes before the good one and it is never trimmed to get somewhere warmer.

What this costs is not eight years. It is the eight years plus a private verdict on yourself for minding them. It costs you the only prayer you actually have, because you say it and then take it back in the same breath. It costs the walk to the bus, which is longer than it was. It costs the honest sentence in a room of three hundred people who love God and would love you. And it costs you a suspicion, formed alone, that a better woman would have moved on to praying about her spirit by now.

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 eight years made lighter first is not one Scripture speaks and not one the Holy Spirit has ever carried.

And plainly, before anything else: if the walk to the bus has gone somewhere darker, as far as thinking the room would carry less if you were not in it, tell one living person today. Your doctor, one of the women at the hatch, 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 stay back and stack chairs.

Now, Romans 8, and I want you to read the noun.

But if the Spirit of him that raised up Jesus from the dead dwell in you, he that raised up Christ from the dead shall also quicken your mortal bodies by his Spirit that dwelleth in you.Romans 8:11

Your mortal bodies.

He could have written your spirits. He has just spent a chapter on the spirit and he is entirely capable of the sentence. He could have written your hearts, which is the word every prayer in that hall reached for tonight. He writes bodies, and then, in case anybody tries to make it a metaphor, he puts the word mortal in front of it, which is a word about dying flesh.

You are named in that verse in the noun you were embarrassed to pray about. Romans 8:11 says your mortal bodies and not your spirits, and the Holy Spirit is named twice in the same sentence as the one who dwells and the one who does the work.

Now look at how many times the Spirit appears in one verse. The Spirit of Him that raised up Jesus. By His Spirit. That dwelleth in you. Paul is stacking it deliberately, and the thing he is stacking it around is not an idea, it is a body.

So the prayer you have been apologizing for is the prayer that verse is about. Not a lesser request from a woman who has not matured into spiritual things. The specific concern of the Spirit who lives in you.

You have the Spirit of the One who raised Jesus living in the body you keep apologizing for wanting Him to care about. That is written into Romans 8:11, and His Spirit dwelling in you is the very reason the verse gives.

Now let me be exact, because eight years of true things have already been said in that hall and none of them landed here.

This verse does not tell you when. Paul does not say tonight, or this year, or in this life, and the whole argument of that chapter runs toward a resurrection at the end of everything rather than a change on a Thursday. I am not going to convert it into a prediction about your body, because it is not one, and what God does in the meantime is His, in His own way.

And it does not say the man leading the prayer was wrong. He was praying good things, and peace of heart is a real gift, and nothing here is a complaint about a man doing his best in front of three hundred people.

What it does is take your prayer out of the category you filed it in. It is not small. It is not materialistic. The word for it is the word Paul used, and he used it on purpose, and the Spirit is all over the sentence.

You were never once out of order for asking about a body God Himself named. Scripture says your mortal bodies, and the same Spirit who raised Christ is described as the one who dwells in the person doing the asking.