The Side You Stopped Sleeping On

He comes down the stairs at ten past six holding the banister with the wrong hand, and he has been doing that for so long that his wife no longer notices it either.

The kettle is on the left of the worktop now. It used to be on the right. Nobody moved it as a decision; it simply drifted, over about four months, the way things do in a kitchen where one arm has quietly gone out of service above shoulder height. The good mugs are on the low shelf. The cereal is on the low shelf. Everything anybody in that house actually uses lives between hip and chest, and if you asked him why he would look at the cupboard and genuinely not know.

He gets the coat off the hook by turning sideways to it, which he learned in the first winter.

There is one more thing, and it is the smallest and it is the one that would tell you the most. When his grandson comes on a Sunday and puts both arms up in the hall, he crouches. He does not lift. He goes all the way down onto his knees on a tiled floor at fifty-nine years old rather than say out loud, in front of his family, that he cannot pick the boy up.

Two years since the fall. Two winters, one course of treatment that helped for a while, and a very large number of mornings that begin with him working out, before his eyes are properly open, which side he came to rest on in the night.

That is you, and there is nobody who knows the whole of it.

Not your wife, who knows about the shoulder. Not the person who treated it, who knows about the joint. What nobody has the full list of is the coat, and the kettle, and the banister, and the crouching in the hall, because you never announced a single one of them. They were not decisions. They were small surrenders, made one at a time, each one so reasonable on the day that it did not seem worth mentioning.

What two years does that the injury never did

The injury was an event. It had a day and an hour and probably a noise, and everybody in your life knows about it, and for a while people asked.

What has happened since is not an event and that is exactly why nobody has asked about it. There was no second fall. There was a slow reorganization of an entire life around one joint, conducted quietly, by a man being sensible, and the reorganization has gone considerably further than the injury ever did.

So let me say the whole of it out loud, since you have not. Scripture stands under that in Psalm 103:2-3, and the Holy Spirit does the part no sentence can do.

It is not only that the shoulder hurts, although it does, and it is worth saying plainly that it does. It is that you have stopped asking for help, because asking would mean naming it, and naming it in front of people who have already heard about it feels like complaining about old news. It is that you have started declining things without ever saying why. It is that somewhere in the second winter you quietly stopped expecting it to be different, and the day you stopped was not marked in any way at all.

And this is where I want to put something down in front of you before we go any further, because it is the thing most likely to be sitting on your chest. God is not tired of this. He has not filed you under a matter already dealt with. Scripture puts the healing of the body inside a list of the things God does, right next to forgiveness, and it says of Him that He forgives all thine iniquities and heals all thy diseases, Psalm 103:2-3, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries that into a kitchen at ten past six rather than leaving it a fine sentence on a page. You are not raising an old matter. You are bringing Him something that is happening today.

Two things that have to be said at the same time

I am going to be careful here, and I want you to see me being careful, because this is a page about a body and you deserve better than enthusiasm.

The first thing. I am not going to promise you an outcome. Not on this page, not in a song, not in a declaration. Nobody writing to a stranger can promise a shoulder, and any voice that does has taken something that is not theirs to hand out. God may do what you are asking. He may do it in a way you did not expect, or at a pace you would not have chosen, and He may do something else entirely, and that decision is His and it is not evidence about you. It is written, in Psalm 103:2-3, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes what is written off a page and into a life.

The second thing, and it is just as true. That does not mean the asking is pointless, and it does not mean you should ask small.

Those two live together more comfortably than people expect. Scripture is full of people who asked God for their bodies in the plainest possible terms and were not rebuked for it. The man at the pool asks. The woman in the crowd reaches. Blind Bartimaeus is told to be quiet by the whole road and shouts louder, and when Jesus asks him what he wants, he does not say whatever you think best. He says he wants to see.

Nothing in that is presumption. And you are not being greedy by wanting to sleep on your own side of the bed. Scripture never once treats a plain request about a body as a lesser kind of prayer, Mark 10:51, and the Holy Spirit is not embarrassed by a man asking for a shoulder.

Nor is any of this instead of the people treating you. Whatever care you are under, stay under it. The hands of the person who treated you are not in competition with God; the Bible has no category in which they would be. If anything on this page ever made you step away from care, I would have failed you, and so would it.

Name the actual joint

Here is the practical middle of this, and it is smaller than you think.

You have been praying, if you have been praying, in the general. Lord, help with the shoulder. Or more likely, and I suspect this is nearer the truth, you have not been praying about it for a long while at all, because after two years the whole subject has taken on the feeling of a thing already asked. Scripture settles that in Psalm 103:2-3, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries it rather than these words.

Be specific. Not because God needs the information, and not because there is a right way to word it that unlocks something, because there is not, and anybody selling you a wording is selling you a technique in place of a Father.

Be specific because specific is what an honest man says when he is actually talking to somebody. The joint. The night. The exact movement that makes you catch your breath, which is not the big one, it is the small one, reaching behind you for a seatbelt.

You are welcome in this conversation with the particular joint and the particular night. Scripture says in every thing by prayer and supplication let your requests be made known unto God, Philippians 4:6, and every thing is the widest phrase in the sentence, and the Holy Spirit is the one who gets a man past the feeling that he already used up his turn on this two years ago.

And say one of them out loud to a person

The other half is not about God at all.

You have a list of small surrenders that nobody has ever seen in full. Not because you are secretive, but because each one arrived alone and none of them looked worth a conversation. I am not putting my own idea over you; Scripture says it in Psalm 103:2-3, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it live.

Say one. Just one, to one person, this week. The coat, or the crouching in the hall, or the fact that the kettle moved. Not as a complaint and not as a request. Simply so that one other human being holds one true piece of a thing you have been carrying entirely on your own for two years.

You have not been asked to do this alone. Scripture says bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ, Galatians 6:2, and the Holy Spirit does not treat a man's ordinary body as too small a burden to be shared.