I Do Not Pick Them Up Any More

The little one runs at him with both arms up. That is what she does. She has done it since she could run.

And he does the thing he has learned to do, which is to sit down first, on the low chair by the door, and then open his arms and let her climb.

It looks like nothing. His daughter has never mentioned it. His wife noticed in about the second week and has never mentioned it either.

He has not picked up a grandchild in fourteen months.

The heart thing was found by accident, in a check for something else entirely, and he is on the tablets and he has been to the clinic four times and the word they use is managed. He walks. He has cut out the things they told him to cut out.

He is not, in any medical sense, forbidden from lifting a two year old, and if you asked his cardiologist she would probably look puzzled.

But there was a Sunday about fourteen months ago when he bent to pick her up and felt something in his chest that was probably nothing, and he put her back down, and something in him closed like a door.

He has never told anybody about that Sunday.

What he has instead is a sentence, running quietly underneath everything: I am the one they have to be careful around now. He is sixty three. He was the one who carried two of them at once, one on each arm, all the way from the car.

That is you, and the sentence is doing more damage than the heart.

Three things straight away

I am not going to tell you to pick her up. I am not your doctor and neither is anybody who writes on the internet, and if there is a real restriction, that restriction is right and it stays.

I am going to tell you to ask. Ring the clinic and ask the plain question: can I lift a two year old. Fourteen months of assuming is worse than one awkward phone call, and they answer questions like this every day.

And I am not going to tell you that if you had more faith the condition would be gone. That is not what the Bible teaches and it has been used to shame far too many people who were already frightened.

You are not less of a man because something was found on a scan. Scripture says the Lord looketh on the heart, 1 Samuel 16:7, and the whole point of that sentence is that God measures a man by something no clinic can see, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is in a courtyard on a low chair with his arms open.

The verse that separates the body from the man

There is a line in Psalm 73 written by somebody who had thought hard about his own decline.

My flesh and my heart faileth: but God is the strength of my heart, and my portion for ever.Psalm 73:26

Look at the honesty first. My flesh and my heart faileth. He does not deny it, he does not spiritualize it, he does not claim it away. He says the plain thing: the body gives out.

Then look at what he does with it. But God is the strength of my heart. He uses the word twice, and the second one is not the muscle. The first heart is the organ that fails. The second heart is the man himself, and its strength is named as somebody other than him.

That is the sentence I want in you instead of the one you have been carrying for fourteen months. Scripture settles that in Psalm 73:26, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries it rather than these words.

Your heart, the medical one, has a condition and is managed. Your heart, the one that made a man carry two children from a car for a decade, does not have that condition and never will, and its strength is not your own supply, so it does not go down when the tablets go up.

You are not diminished as a man by a diagnosis. Scripture says God is the strength of my heart, and my portion for ever, Psalm 73:26, and the psalm concedes the body first and then names the strength as His, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that difference real to a man on a Sunday afternoon.

The Sunday you never told anybody about

Fourteen months, and nobody knows.

That is the thing I would move first, and it has nothing to do with your chest.

You felt something, and you put a child down, and you decided in that instant, alone, without a doctor and without your wife and without a single word spoken, what kind of man you now were. And then you built a system around the decision: the low chair, sitting down first, the arms open instead of the arms lifting.

The system works so well that nobody has questioned it, which has let a private verdict operate for over a year without ever being tested by anybody who knows anything.

That is what fear does when it is kept. It does not stay the size it was. It becomes policy.

You are not required to carry a private verdict about your own body. Scripture says confess your faults one to another, and pray one for another, that ye may be healed, James 5:16, and the verse assumes a thing said out loud to another human being, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a man able to tell his wife about a Sunday fourteen months late.

What they will remember

Let me say the thing about the grandchildren, because it is not what you fear.

You believe the loss is the lifting. It is not.

That little girl will not remember being carried. Nobody remembers being carried at two. What she will remember, if this goes on, is the atmosphere: that abuelo was a bit careful, that there was something a little bit fragile in the room, that grown-ups changed their voices slightly around him.

And what she would remember instead, if you let her, is a man who sat down on a low chair and opened his arms every single time and never once was too busy.

That is not a consolation prize. Sitting down and waiting with your arms open is a better thing than lifting, and it is available to you today regardless of what the clinic says.

You are not less of a grandfather sitting down. Scripture says the glory of children are their fathers, Proverbs 17:6, and glory in that verse is about presence rather than about strength, and the Holy Spirit is not measuring what a man can lift.