The Redemption Of The Body Is An Actual Phrase

Late afternoon, and somebody has opened the blind properly for once, so the room has actual light in it instead of that gray.

Her sister has brought grapes, which nobody eats, and a magazine, which is the right thing to bring because it is a way of sitting down for two hours without needing to say anything for all of them.

Forty-six. Third admission this year.

The chaplain came at eleven and he was good. He did not overstay and he did not perform. He held her hand for a moment and he said, in a kind voice, that the body is not really the point, that what matters is the soul, that she is more than this.

He meant it as freedom. She could hear that he meant it as freedom.

And it did the opposite, and she has been trying all afternoon to work out why, while her sister turns pages beside her.

Because if the body is not the point, then this, all of this, the whole enterprise of the last two years, the cannulas and the counting and the way she now measures a good day, is a fuss about scenery. And she is not able to believe that. Not because of theology. Because she is in it.

If somebody has told you that your body is not what matters, you know they were trying to lift something off you, and you know exactly how heavy it got instead.

Paul puts the body in the sentence on purpose

Weigh it first and weigh it fully, because on this site the honest paragraph runs before the good one and it is never trimmed to reach it faster.

What this costs is not the admission. It is being asked to agree that the arena of your suffering is a side matter. It costs you the coherence of your own life, because a person cannot spend two years in a body and then file the body under scenery. It costs you the chaplain, who was good and who you will now be pleasant to. It costs the honest sentence in a room where somebody is being kind. And it costs you an afternoon of trying to work out why freedom landed as dismissal, with a magazine turning beside you.

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 two 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 third admission has gone past exhaustion into thinking your family would have simpler months without all of this, tell one living person today. Your doctor, the nurse on tonight, your sister with the magazine, 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 bring grapes and sit for two hours.

Now, Romans 8, and I want you to see the phrase with your own eyes because most people have never noticed it is there.

And not only they, but ourselves also, which have the firstfruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body.Romans 8:23

The redemption of our body.

Not the redemption of our souls from our bodies. Not release from the body. The body itself is the object of the verb, and the whole of creation in the preceding verses is described as waiting for it, and the people who have the Spirit are described as groaning while they wait.

You are inside a sentence in which the body itself is the thing being redeemed. Romans 8:23 makes it the object rather than the obstacle, and the Holy Spirit is named in the same verse as the firstfruits of the very thing being waited for.

Now the word groan, because it is doing something for a woman in a bed. Paul says the people who have the Spirit groan. Not the ones who are behind. Not the ones who have failed to reach a better attitude. Having the Spirit is given as the reason for the groaning, because the deposit in you knows what is coming and the gap between that and this room is felt.

You have the firstfruits, and the groaning is evidence of them rather than evidence against you. That is written into Romans 8:23, and His Spirit in you is the one Paul names as the cause of it.

So the chaplain was trying to give you something and he handed you the wrong object. There is real freedom in this chapter and it is not the freedom of the body mattering less. It is the freedom of the body being on the list.

Now let me be exact about what this does not say, because two years of true things have already been said to you in the wrong shape.

It says nothing about this admission or the next one. It does not predict your body in this life, it does not hint, and I will not do it either, because what God does there is His, in His own way, and anybody who is confident about somebody else's third admission is being confident about themselves.

The redemption Paul names is not a treatment plan. He is not describing something that happens on a Tuesday in a ward. He is describing a thing at the end of everything, which is exactly why he uses the word waiting, and I am not going to blur that to give you a nicer afternoon.

And it does not rank you. There is no clause comparing your groaning to anybody's. There is only ourselves also, which is a phrase that puts you inside a company rather than in a line.

You were never asked to file your body under scenery. Scripture makes the body the object of redemption, and the same Spirit who is the firstfruits is the one who makes that land in a room with the blind finally open.