I Have Not Looked Up In Months

The water has gone cold and she has not noticed, which is how she knows she has been standing there a while.

Eleven at night. Dishes that could have waited. She is not doing them because they need doing, she is doing them because standing at a sink with her hands in water is a way of being in a room without being in it.

And the thought that arrives is a strange one, and it arrives out of nowhere, and it is not about the dishes.

I have not looked up in months.

She means it literally, which is the part that unsettles her. Her eyes go from a phone to a counter to a step to a floor. When people talk to her she looks at their shoulder. She has driven a familiar road four times a week since March and could not tell you what color the house on the corner is.

Somewhere in the spring her whole body arranged itself into a downward position, and nobody instructed it to, and she did not decide it, and it has been like that so long that upright feels like a thing other people are doing.

You know this. It might not be a sink. But there is a bend you have been living at, and you did not choose it, and at some point you stopped noticing that it was a position at all and started thinking it was your shape.

She did not ask, and she did not straighten herself

There is a woman in Luke who had been bent over for eighteen years, and the two most important facts about her story are the ones nobody preaches.

The first is that she never asked. She was in the synagogue, on a Sabbath, doing what she did, and there is no record of her approaching anybody or requesting anything. Jesus saw her. He called her over. She had made no application.

The second is in the verse itself.

And he laid his hands on her: and immediately she was made straight, and glorified God.Luke 13:13

She was made straight. Passive. Not: she straightened. Not: she found the strength. Somebody did it to her, and every bit of the doing was on His side of it.

You are one that God straightens, and the straightening has never been a thing you were expected to perform on yourself. That is what the written word says over you and not a warm thing I have chosen to say to a tired woman at a sink, and the Holy Spirit who is in you at eleven at night is the evidence that the lifting of your eyes has never been your own project.

Watch what that does to the arithmetic you run in that kitchen. If the straightening is His, then months of looking at shoulders is information about a spring that took something out of you. It is not information about your character, and it never had the standing to become that.

Nobody is asking you to look up

Here is the second thing, and it is the reason this page will not do what everything else has done.

Everything else has an instruction. Lift your eyes. Count your blessings. Look at what you still have. Every one of those, said to a person in the bend, lands as another thing she is failing at, because the whole problem is that the looking up is not currently available.

So there is no instruction here. Not one.

You have been carried through every month since the spring, and the carrying did not require you to raise your eyes once. Scripture says He works all things after the counsel of His own will, and it is the Holy Spirit doing that work in you rather than waiting for you to demonstrate a better posture.

And say this too: a body and a mind that arrange themselves downward for months is something worth telling a doctor about. That is not a lack of faith. Very often it is what God is doing, arriving through an appointment.

This is where your mouth comes into it, because I am not leaving you with a nice thought and cold water. Jesus taught that the smallest living faith a person has, spoken out loud at the thing in the way, is enough for God to work with. Out loud. Not thought about at a sink for months. And the thing in the way is not the spring and it is not the people whose shoulders you have been looking at. It is a sentence that has never been said out loud: this is my shape now.

You have real authority to answer it, and it is yours because you are in Christ, not because you feel like a woman with any authority with her hands in cold water. Scripture hands you the standing and the Holy Spirit carries the words, and the power was never in how upright you felt saying them.

If this has taken you somewhere darker than tiredness, and there are nights when you would rather not be here at all, tell a living person today. Your doctor, or a crisis line, 988 in the United States, 116 123 in the United Kingdom, or the emergency number where you live. That is not a detour from what God is doing with your life. Very often it is exactly what He is doing, arriving down a telephone.