This Body Carried People

Name the people this body has carried. Go on. You will run out of breath before you run out of names.

Your mother, at the end. Somebody's baby through a night that would not end. A friend after a phone call, physically held up in a doorway. Your own children, hundreds of times, up stairs, out of cars, out of water.

That was this body. The one you have spent decades wishing there were less of. It has been the vehicle for every act of love you have ever performed, and it has performed them without ever being thanked once.

That is the thing I want to say out loud, because I do not think anybody has ever said it to you: you have used this body to carry people through the hardest hours of their lives, and you have never once expressed a word of gratitude toward it.

Let me put the plain thing first. You have not been careless with any of this. You have gone at the size question for years and you have gotten up every time, and you have carried other people while doing it. Somebody who did not care would not have carried anybody.

So this page will not ask you to like your body. That is not what gratitude is and the two get confused constantly.

I want to show you a verse where God describes Himself as the one doing the carrying.

Gratitude is not liking

Consider the difference, because it is what has made this impossible up to now.

Liking is an aesthetic response. It is about how something looks and how you feel when you look at it, and you cannot manufacture it and nobody should ask you to.

Gratitude is an account of what something has done. It requires no aesthetic response whatsoever. You can be entirely unmoved by the appearance of a thing and completely clear about what it has accomplished, and that is not a contradiction, it is how everybody feels about a good truck.

You are able to be grateful without liking anything, and no thanks has ever once required an aesthetic opinion first. Isaiah 46:4 says even to your old age I am he, and to hoar hairs will I carry you, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a verse about being carried land on somebody who has only ever done the carrying.

And notice why nobody has ever suggested it. Every conversation you have had about your body has been an evaluation, and gratitude does not fit into an evaluation, so it has never come up. It is a completely different kind of sentence and nobody has ever offered you the grammar for it.

You have never once been handed the grammar for a sentence like that, and no evaluation has ever once had room for gratitude in it. The written word says I have made and I will bear, even I will carry and will deliver you, and the Spirit of God is the one who supplies a sentence a person has never had.

I will carry you

Isaiah writes it as God speaking, and every verb is His.

And even to your old age I am he; and even to hoar hairs will I carry you: I have made, and I will bear; even I will carry, and will deliver you. (Isaiah 46:4, King James Version)

I have made. I will bear. I will carry. I will deliver.

Four verbs, one subject, and the subject is God. And the whole sentence is about carrying, which is exactly what you have been doing for other people for decades without noticing that somebody has been doing it for you the whole time.

You have been carried through every year you spent carrying, and no carrier has ever once gone uncarried in that verse. Isaiah 46 puts God in the position of the one bearing the weight, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that noticeable to somebody who is used to being the one who takes the weight.

And read where it goes. Even to your old age. Even to gray hairs. The carrying does not end when you become less useful, which is the fear underneath most of this, and Isaiah names the exact stage where you would expect the arrangement to lapse.

You are carried in the years when you are less useful, and no carrying of God's has ever once been conditional on what you can still do. The Spirit of God is the one who makes that reach forward rather than only backward, and the written word says even to hoar hairs will I carry you.

Say thank you out loud

Now the part I came to say, and it is one sentence said in the wrong direction.

Name one person this body carried. Out loud, by name.

Then put a hand flat on your chest and say thank you. To the body. Out loud.

That will feel absurd and possibly slightly wrong, and it is neither. It is an account of what a thing has done, said out loud, once, by the only person in a position to give it.

You are giving an account rather than an opinion, and no thanks has ever once been the same thing as approval. The written word has God name the carrying as His own work over a whole lifetime, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a sentence in that direction possible after decades of the other kind.

And here is why it matters more than it sounds. A thing that has never been thanked is a thing that has only ever been assessed. One sentence of gratitude, said out loud, puts a completely different kind of statement on the record, and after that the record is no longer unanimous.

You have a record that is no longer unanimous, and no assessment has ever once been the only kind of sentence available. The Spirit of God is the one who gets one different sentence into a long record, and Isaiah 46:4 is the written word underneath it, where God has made and will bear and will carry and will deliver, all the way to gray hairs.