The Walk She Keeps Not Taking

There is a path that starts about two hundred yards from her front door and goes up along the top and comes back round by the church.

Forty minutes. She has never once walked it.

She has lived there nine years.

It is not that she is against walking. She would tell you she likes the idea of it. It is that every time she thinks about doing it, something else arrives with it, uninvited, about a second later.

The something else is a voice, and the voice is not new. It has been there since she was about fifteen. It does not say anything as clean as you are lazy. It says: yes, and about time, and let us see how long this lasts, and remember the last three times.

So the walk has become a thing with an argument attached, and she has enough arguments.

Here is what she cannot explain to the people who love her.

When they say, quite kindly, that she should look after herself, she does not hear kindness. She hears the same voice with a different accent. She hears somebody agreeing that there is something wrong with her that ought to be addressed.

She knows they do not mean that. She is not stupid and she is not paranoid. It arrives that way anyway, and by the time she has finished translating it back into kindness the moment has gone and she has said something light and changed the subject.

If you cannot hear look after yourself without hearing something underneath it, come and walk a bit of this path. Nobody is going to tell you what to do.

Made, and the psalm says so before it says anything else

There is a verse that gets put on cards, and the card version has worn the edges off it, so let me put it back in the middle of the psalm it lives in.

I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.Psalm 139:14

The psalm around that verse is not about appearance and it is not about fitness. It is about a God who knew a person before there was anything of them to know, who was present while they were being put together in the dark, and whose thoughts toward them are described as more in number than the sand.

And in the middle of all that, the man writing it says: made.

Not improved. Not corrected. Not almost right. Made, on purpose, by somebody who was there.

You were made rather than approved, and that came first and it came from God. Psalm 139:14 puts the making before any question of what has been done with it since, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an old verse land in a person who has been arguing with themselves since they were fifteen, which means the ground under you is not your record.

The voice is not God, and you can tell by the tone

Now let me deal with the voice, because everything in this article depends on knowing who is speaking.

That voice is not new to you and I am not going to pretend I can remove it. What I can do is tell you something about how to identify it, and Scripture is unusually clear on this.

The voice that comes from God is specific, and it is quiet, and it stops. It says one thing and then it is done with you.

The other voice generalizes, keeps a record, brings up the last three times, and never finishes. It attaches itself to good suggestions so that you cannot pick up the suggestion without it. That is its whole method and it has been using it on you for a long time.

You are not under accusation, and there is not a case open on you. Romans 8:1 says there is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and it is His Spirit named in the very next line as the law of life that has made you free, which means the tone you have been hearing underneath every kind sentence is not coming from where you have been assuming.

And here is what this article is not going to do.

It is not going to tell you what to eat, or how to move, or how much of anything. There is no way of living being recommended here, nothing to give up, nothing to take up, and not one word about anybody's medicine, which stays entirely between you and the person who prescribes it.

There is no plan. If there were a plan, the voice would have something to measure, and I am not handing it a ruler.

You have permission to be kind to yourself in one small physical way with nothing attached to it. 1 Corinthians 6:19 calls the body the temple of the Holy Spirit which you have of God, and it is His Spirit who lives in the body you are actually standing in, which means a kindness done in it is done somewhere God already is.

God is the one holding you, and He was holding you through every one of the years you spent at war with yourself.