Nineteen, And No Before

The question always comes in the same shape, and it always comes from somebody kind.

So what were you like? Before all this, I mean. What did you use to do?

She is thirty-eight. She has been ill since she was nineteen. She has been asked that question, she reckons, several hundred times, at kitchen tables exactly like this one, on a Saturday morning exactly like this one, with the back door open and somebody's kid shouting in the yard and pancakes going round.

And the honest answer, the one she has never once given, is: nothing. There was no before. She was a girl, and then she was a sick girl, and there was no run of adult years in between where she was healthy and doing things and being a version of herself that anybody could ask her about now.

So she has learned to answer with high school. Track, she says. I ran the four hundred. Which is true and which is nineteen years old and which is the only card in her hand, and every single time she plays it she watches the other person do the arithmetic and go gentle.

What she wants to say, and does not, is that the question assumes a life shaped like a hill. Climb, summit, descent. And hers has never been that shape, and the kindness in the question is quietly telling her that her real life was supposed to be somewhere she has never been.

If you have been asked what you used to be like and had nothing to hand over, you know the specific tiredness of that pause, and you know it is not the asker's fault.

Before the world began, and there was no hill in it

Let me put down what this costs before I put down anything else, because on this site the weight goes on the scale first and it goes on whole.

It costs the story. Everybody else gets a narrative, and yours has a missing act, and every social encounter for the rest of your life is going to reach for that act and come up with nothing. It costs the ordinary adult experiences you have simply never had, and which people around you assume everyone has had, so nobody even thinks to name them. It costs the four hundred meters at seventeen being the newest fact about you at thirty-eight. And it costs you the small performance in every kitchen, where you produce a card you have played five hundred times and then watch somebody's face soften.

That is not a small load and I am not going to call it one, and I am not going to set it next to anybody else's either. There is no ranking of suffering here and there never will be, and any word from God that needs a load made smaller first is not one Scripture ever speaks and not one the Holy Spirit has ever carried.

And I am saying this early because it belongs early: if any of this has taken you past tiredness and into thinking that the people around that table would have an easier life without you at it, tell one living person today. A doctor, a friend who will stay past fifteen minutes, or a crisis line where you live, 988 by call or text in the United States and its equivalent wherever you are. That is not a failure of faith, and using every bit of care available to you is not a lack of anything.

Now hear what Paul wrote to a young man who was frightened and unwell and being asked to be something.

Who hath saved us, and called us with an holy calling, not according to our works, but according to his own purpose and grace, which was given us in Christ Jesus before the world began.2 Timothy 1:9

Read where the giving happened. Before the world began.

Not at nineteen. Not at the moment you were still running. Not during a stretch of good years that you would need to have had in order to qualify. Before there was a world, before there was a body, before there was a track or a diagnosis or a Saturday morning with pancakes, the purpose and the grace were given, in Christ, to you.

You were called, and the calling has no before in it because it predates before. Second Timothy 1:9 puts the giving prior to the world itself, and the Holy Spirit who seals it is not working from a record of your healthy years, because that verse says plainly it is not according to works.

Say that back slowly, because there is a whole religion of respectable people who would rather you did not. Not according to our works. Paul could have written a different clause. He is writing to somebody he loves, who is nervous and sick and inheriting a hard job, and he could easily have said something encouraging about Timothy's record. He does not. He goes out of his way to say that the record is not the basis.

You have a calling that was not assembled out of anything you managed to do, and it cannot be reduced by anything you have not managed. That is what Scripture says in that verse, and the same Spirit who calls is the one holding it, so nineteen years of being unable to has taken nothing off it.

Now let me be exact about what this verse does not say, because you have been handed enough encouraging sentences at enough kitchen tables.

It says nothing about your body. Not a word. It does not promise you a healthy decade, it does not hint at one, and it is not code for one. I am not going to predict your body and I am not going to speak for God about it, because what He does there is His, in His own way, and every confident sentence about somebody else's prognosis is a person guessing out loud.

What it settles is the thing under the question at the table. Whether your real life is somewhere you have never been.

It is not. There is no missing act. Second Timothy 1:9 puts the purpose God gave you in Christ before the world had a shape, and it did not require the shape of a hill, and the Holy Spirit has never once held your life beside a version He did not give you.

You are not living an interrupted life, you are living the one that was given. The word says the purpose and grace were given in Christ Jesus before the world began, and the Spirit given to you is the guarantee on that purpose rather than a consolation for a missing decade.