Four Years and Nothing on the Scan

She has a folder. Not a metaphorical one, an actual plastic wallet, and in it there are printouts and dates and a list she keeps of what she has tried and when.

The folder exists because at some point in the second year she realized she was spending as much energy proving it as she was living with it.

Four years. Every day. Not the same intensity, and there are days that are nearly fine and days she cannot describe to anybody, and it moves around enough that describing it makes her sound uncertain, which is exactly the impression she is trying not to give.

And nothing shows. Every scan clear. Every blood test unremarkable. Everybody has been perfectly professional and one person was genuinely kind, and the sentence she keeps meeting is a version of we cannot find anything, which is meant as reassurance and lands as an accusation.

She has stopped mentioning it at church. There was a stretch where people prayed for her, and then it went on, and she could feel the shape of the room change, and now when somebody asks she says she is doing all right.

She has begun, in the fourth year, to catch herself wondering whether she is imagining it. Not seriously. But the wondering has started, and that frightens her more than the pain does.

That is you, and it is not in your head.

Two things I will not move off

The first. Stay with the doctors and keep going back.

This is not medical advice and I have no idea what is happening in your body. But nothing on this page is a reason to stop pursuing an answer, and there is no version of trusting God in Scripture that runs through a woman giving up on being investigated. Keep the folder. Keep the appointments.

The second. I am not going to promise you an outcome.

Not here, not in a song, not in a declaration. God may do what you are asking. He may do it in a way you did not expect, or slowly, and He may do something else, and that is His and it will never be a report on you. Anybody who promises you a body has handed out something that was never theirs.

You are welcome to bring this to God exactly as it is, unexplained. Scripture says the Lord is nigh unto all them that call upon him, to all that call upon him in truth, Psalm 145:18, and the truth of your situation is that nobody can name it, and the Holy Spirit is not put off by a condition with no label on it.

Twelve years, and everything she had

There is a woman in Luke's Gospel whose situation is closer to yours than almost anybody's in Scripture.

And a woman having an issue of blood twelve years, which had spent all her living upon physicians, neither could be healed of any, came behind him, and touched the border of his garment.Luke 8:43-44

Look at what Luke records about her before anything happens.

Twelve years. Long enough that everybody in her life had adjusted to it and stopped asking.

Spent all her living upon physicians. She did not neglect it. She pursued it, exhaustively, with everything she had, and the pursuing itself cost her everything she owned. Luke does not present that as foolishness. He presents it as a fact about how hard she tried.

Neither could be healed of any. No answer anywhere. Not one of them could tell her what to do.

And then she comes behind him. Not to the front, not with a request out loud. Behind, in a crowd, because twelve years of being an unsolved case teaches a person not to take up room.

That is a woman who has stopped expecting to be believed, and Jesus turns round in the middle of a crowd and makes her the only person in the story.

You are not an unsolved case to God. Scripture records twelve years, every physician, and no answer, and none of it counts against her, Luke 8:43, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries that into a kitchen where a woman is looking at a plastic wallet.

The second exhaustion

Here is the thing about your four years that almost nobody names, and it is why you are more tired than the pain alone would explain. Scripture already said it in Luke 8:43-44, and the Holy Spirit is the one doing the work, not the sentence.

You are carrying two jobs. None of that is mine to declare on my own. Scripture said it first in Luke 8:43-44, and the Holy Spirit is the one who brings it the distance.

The first is the pain, which is what it is, and which you manage with a competence nobody sees.

The second is the case. The folder, the dates, the careful wording so as not to sound vague, the calibration of how much to say to whom, the constant low-level work of remaining credible. That job runs all day, every day, and it is invisible, and it is exhausting in a way that the first one is not, because it is performed in front of an audience that may not believe you.

And the deepest cost of it is what has started this year: you have begun to run the case against yourself. When you are your own prosecution, there is nowhere left in the world where the pain is simply allowed to be true.

You are not required to prove this to God before He will take it seriously. Scripture says the Lord looketh on the heart, 1 Samuel 16:7, and nothing anywhere in it makes His attention conditional on a diagnosis, and the Holy Spirit does not read scan results before deciding whether somebody is suffering.

He would not let her go unnamed

There is a detail in that story that is worth the whole of this page.

She touches the edge of His clothing and she is healed, and she intends to disappear back into the crowd, and He stops everything and asks who touched Him.

The disciples think it is a ridiculous question in that crush. He waits.

And she comes trembling and tells Him, in front of everybody, the whole thing. Luke says she declared unto Him before all the people why she had touched Him and how she was healed immediately.

He did not need the information. He stopped the road so that twelve years of a private, unbelieved, undocumented suffering could be said out loud in public by the woman it belonged to, and heard.

You are not meant to be carrying this where nobody can see it. Scripture has Him stop a crowd so that a woman could say her own story out loud, Luke 8:47, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes room for a person to be believed rather than merely treated.

Say it plainly, and say it to one person

Two things, and both are small.

The first is God, and I suspect you have gone vague with Him too, because four years of vagueness with everybody else becomes a habit. Say it specifically. Where it is, what it is like today, what it stopped you doing this week. Not because a wording unlocks anything, but because you have spent four years managing how you describe this and God is the one audience where the management is unnecessary. Scripture put that in writing long before you read it here, in Luke 8:43-44, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes written words land.

The second is one person at that church. Not the room, and not a request for prayer that will go on a list.

One sentence: I am still in pain every day and nothing has ever shown up, and I stopped mentioning it because I could feel people getting tired.

The person you say that to will not be tired of you. The room got tired; people do not, and the two are not the same thing and you have been treating them as one for two years.

You were not meant to carry this without anybody. Scripture says bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ, Galatians 6:2, and it names no exception for burdens that cannot be verified, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves an ordinary friend into a chair beside somebody who has been alone with it.