My Knees Are Not Renewed Like An Eagle

The back door is open because the morning is that kind of morning, and there is a blackbird being extremely rude about something in the hedge.

Four of them around the table. Toast. Somebody's dog has come in and is being ignored on purpose.

She is sixty-two.

And she is going to ask her question today. She has decided. She has been carrying it for six years and this is a good table and these are the right people and she is going to say it.

The question is: are those verses about my body.

Because she has been told, since she was a girl, that God renews. Renews your strength. Renews your youth like the eagle's. New every morning. And she has believed it, and she has quoted it to other people, and she has meant it.

And her knees are worse this year than last year, which were worse than the year before, and that is the pattern and everybody knows the pattern.

So either the verses are about her body and they are not happening, which is a problem, or they are about something else, in which case she would very much like somebody to tell her what, in plain words, without going soft and vague at the crucial moment.

If you have wanted to ask that question at a table, you know why you have not, and you know it is not because you doubt God.

Read what is actually in the list

The weight first and at its own size, because on this site the honest paragraph comes before the good one and it never gets shortened.

What this costs is not the knees, although the knees are the pattern and the pattern is the pattern. It is six years of a question you have not been able to ask. It costs you the plain reading of verses you were raised on, which is a strange thing for a lifelong believer to lose. It costs the vagueness that arrives whenever anybody tries to answer, which you can hear coming and which ends the conversation. It costs you the morning table, a little, because there is a thing at it that you are not saying. And it costs you the suspicion, which you do not believe and cannot shift, that asking at all is a fault.

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 six 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 pattern has taken you somewhere darker, as far as thinking this table would be easier without a chair at it, tell one living person today. Your doctor, one of the three eating your toast, 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 leave the back door open and let the dog in.

Now, Psalm 103, and read the list rather than the famous line.

Who forgiveth all thine iniquities; who healeth all thy diseases; who redeemeth thy life from destruction; who crowneth thee with lovingkindness and tender mercies; who satisfieth thy mouth with good things; so that thy youth is renewed like the eagle's.Psalm 103:3-5

Now look at what the sentence is actually built out of.

Forgiving. Redeeming from destruction. Crowning with lovingkindness and tender mercies. Satisfying with good. And then, at the end, as a result of all of it: so that thy youth is renewed like the eagle's.

The renewal at the end is a consequence clause. The psalm is not making a promise about a body and then illustrating it. It is listing what God does with a person, most of it interior and covenantal, and then saying that the effect of being dealt with like that is a kind of renewing.

You are looking at a list whose items are mostly things that happen where nobody can see them. Psalm 103:3-5 puts forgiving and crowning and satisfying in the same sentence as the renewing, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes an old list off a page and lays it on a kitchen table with the back door open.

Now, and this is the part where people go vague and I am not going to. Yes, healing is in that list. Who healeth all thy diseases is right there in verse three and I am not going to pretend it says something else.

And here is the honest thing. Whatever God does about a body, He does when He does, and Psalm 103 does not say a word about the timing of it or the guarantee of it in this life, and every person who has ever quoted it at a funeral knows that. Your knees are doing what they are doing. I will not stand here and tell you that verse says otherwise this year.

You have never been lied to by the psalm; you have been given a list with no timetable in it. That is written into Psalm 103, and His Spirit in you is the one who lets a person read a verse honestly without losing it.

Now, the other thing, which is your actual question. Is anything at all going the other way.

Yes. And Scripture is specific about it elsewhere: the inward man is renewed day by day, and it says so in the same breath as saying the outward man perishes, and it puts them side by side without one canceling the other. That is not a substitution. Nobody is offering you an interior gift in exchange for your knees, and if anybody has, they were wrong and this site does not do it.

You have two things going on at once, and neither one is a payment for the other. That is written into 2 Corinthians 4:16, and the same Spirit who renews is the one who holds both facts in a person without either being a consolation prize.