This One. He Said This One.

The porch swing needs a chain looked at, which everybody says and nobody does, and it is that hour of the afternoon when the whole yard turns the color of weak honey.

Her granddaughter is on one side of her and a bowl of beans is on the other, and they are shelling them the way you do, mostly not talking.

Sixty-one.

Earlier there was the thing at the steps. Three of them, at her son's place. Her son and her daughter-in-law came out and stood there, ready without hovering, which took them about two years to learn, and it took her a full minute and she said what she always says.

Sorry. Sorry, this is ridiculous. I know, I know. Bear with me.

She says it at every set of steps in the county. She says it getting into cars and getting out of chairs and putting a coat on. She has said sorry about her own body, out loud, at a conservative estimate, four thousand times in six years.

And on the swing, with the beans, her granddaughter says out of nowhere: Gran, why do you say sorry.

And she does not have an answer. She has a hundred half answers, all of them about not being a burden. None of them survives being said to an eleven year old.

If you have your own version of that apology, you know it comes out before you decide to say it, and you know nobody ever asked you for it.

Paul points at the body that is standing there

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

What this costs is not the steps. It is six years of a running apology that has quietly become a description of you. It costs you the position of being an ordinary person in a room. It costs the minute at the steps, which is a real minute, and it costs the four thousand sorries, which have taught your family, without anybody meaning it, that your body is a thing to be excused. It costs the coat and the car and the chair. And it costs you a question from an eleven year old that you cannot answer.

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 apologizing has gone deeper than habit, as far as thinking the family would have easier afternoons without the whole arrangement of you, tell one living person today. Your doctor, your son, 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 come out and stand at the bottom of the steps.

Now, 1 Corinthians 15, and I want you to notice which body Paul points at.

For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality.1 Corinthians 15:53

This corruptible. This mortal.

He is not gesturing at a category. He uses the demonstrative twice, which in Greek as in English is the word you use when you are pointing at a thing in the room. He could have written a general sentence about human beings. He writes this, twice, about the body that is actually there.

You are the this in that sentence, and Paul is pointing at the body that has been apologized for. First Corinthians 15:53 puts a demonstrative in front of both nouns, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a word chosen for emphasis and lays it on a porch swing at four in the afternoon.

Now hold on to what he does not do, because it is the whole comfort. He does not say this corruptible must be swapped. He does not say this mortal will be discarded and a better one issued. He says it puts on. The image is of a garment going over something that stays underneath, and the thing underneath is the body he is pointing at.

You have a body that is going to be clothed rather than replaced. That is written into 1 Corinthians 15:53, and His Spirit in you is the deposit on that particular verb.

Which means the object of your four thousand apologies is the object of God's most specific promise. Not a general improvement in the human condition. This one. The one that takes a minute at three steps.

Now let me be exact about what this does not say, because six years of good people have already said nice things at the bottom of a lot of stairs.

It says nothing about those three steps getting easier. It makes no promise about this year or next year, and I will not make one, because what God does with your body now is His, in His own way, and anybody who is confident about somebody else's seventh year is being confident about themselves.

And it does not tell you the apologizing was a sin. It is not a moral failure, it is a reflex that six years of being helped will build in almost anybody, and this site is not going to hand a woman a fresh thing to feel bad about while she is shelling beans.

You were never asked to be sorry for the thing God has promised to clothe. Scripture points at this body twice, and the same Spirit who raised Christ is the one who is described as doing the work on it.