Sore Where I Was Carried

You are eleven weeks out and you are standing in the bathroom with the door shut, pressing a spot on your ribs just under your left arm.

It is not much. That is the first thing. If a doctor asked you to rate it you would say a two, maybe a three if you press it properly, and you feel faintly ridiculous even doing it.

But it is still there. Eleven weeks. And it is exactly, precisely, to the width of a shoulder, the place where somebody's shoulder went when they got underneath you and took your weight.

You remember which one it was. You remember the smell of his jacket and the sound he made on the second lift, the one people make when a thing is heavier than they had planned for. You remember that nobody said much on the way down, because nobody had any breath spare for saying much.

And you remember that you were, at the time, entirely happy about all of it. That is the thing that makes tonight strange. At the time it was the best thing that had ever happened to you.

Now press it once more and look at your own face in the mirror while you do it.

Because here is what has actually been going on for eleven weeks. Everybody says you look well. You do look well. You are back at work, you are answering messages, you made a joke on Thursday that landed, and three separate people have told you how good it is to see you back to yourself.

And under your arm, in a place nobody can see and nobody has asked about, there is a small tender patch, and every single time you find it you have the same half second of dread. Not pain. Dread.

Because if it still hurts, then maybe it did not work. And if it did not work, then all of it is coming back. And if all of it is coming back, then everyone who stood around you and everyone who lifted and everyone who said the kind thing at the door did it for nothing.

So you have not mentioned the sore place to a single person on this earth.

You put your shirt on. You go back downstairs. You are fine.

The body that came out of the grave

I want to take you to the strangest detail in the whole resurrection, and it is strange because of what it does not do.

Eight days after the tomb, a room, a locked door, and a man who has publicly refused to accept any of it without evidence. And Christ walks in and goes straight to him, and this is what He says.

Then saith he to Thomas, Reach hither thy finger, and behold my hands; and reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into my side: and be not faithless, but believing.John 20:27

Sit with what that verse quietly assumes. There is something there to reach into.

The resurrection body, the fully rescued, fully victorious, death-behind-Him body, still had the places in it. Not scars in the sense of things left untended. Marks. The exact geography of what happened to Him, kept, on purpose, in a body that could have come out of that tomb looking like anything at all.

You have been rescued into a body that keeps its places, and that is written into the one account we have of the other side, and the Holy Spirit made sure the detail survived instead of quietly editing it into something smoother.

And He does not hide them. That is the second half, and it is the half that matters at eleven weeks. He does not keep His hands in His sleeves. He holds them out, to the one man in the room who could not go on without seeing, and He makes the marked place the very thing He offers.

What the tenderness is actually telling you

Now let me say the thing that has been under the floorboards, out loud, so it stops living down there.

Sore is not the same as sinking. They feel similar in the dark and they are not the same, and the difference is the whole of this page.

Sinking is the water coming back over your head. Sore is the mark of a shoulder that went under you and did not give way. One of those is a return of the thing. The other is the receipt.

You have a tender place under your arm because somebody carried you, and Scripture is where that stands rather than in the dread you feel at half past eleven at night, and the same Spirit who kept the marks in the record is not reading your tenderness as a relapse.

And I am not going to tell you the after is easy. It is not, and anybody who says it is has either forgotten or was never in it. The after is quieter than the rescue and there is nobody standing around, and the assumption in every room is that all of it is behind you now, and there is a strange loneliness in being the man everybody has stopped worrying about.

One plain paragraph, and it belongs right here, because this stretch is where people go back in. If what is happening at eleven weeks is not a sore rib but the thought of ending your life, then that gets said tonight, out loud, to a living human being. In the United States, call or text 988 and somebody picks up, and you do not have to be in the middle of it to be allowed to call. Anywhere else, emergency services or your local crisis line, and if you cannot bring the number up, say that to whoever answers and let them find it. Then tell one person in your house or on your phone before you sleep. That is not a failure of faith and it does not make you a burden, and it is not an admission that the rescue did not work. God put real rescue into human hands on purpose, and reaching for a hand is obedience and not defeat.

Nor am I going to give you a date for the tenderness. There is no calendar anywhere in Scripture for how long an after takes, and every number a person has ever put on it came from somebody who wanted the subject closed. You were not handed a schedule with your rescue, and His word does not carry one, and the Spirit of God is not standing over you with a stopwatch running.