The Pain Stopped In February

The scan was clear in February and Yaakov has not told anybody what that did to him.

Not the relief. Everybody got the relief. There were forty messages and his sister cried on the phone and somebody brought a cake to the house with the wrong thing written on it and it was the best afternoon of his adult life.

The other thing arrived about four days later, quietly, while he was standing at a cupboard.

Because there is a shelf in that cupboard, and on that shelf is the architecture of eleven months of being seriously ill: the anti-sickness ones, the ones for the mouth ulcers, the steroids, the two for pain, the one for sleep, and a small folded chart in his own handwriting because at one point there were fourteen things at different hours and he could not hold it in his head.

Most of them stopped. Some of them stopped by themselves, the way you stop taking something you no longer need without noticing the last time.

Two did not.

He is not in pain. He wants to be precise about this because he has been precise about everything since February, which is how he has coped. There is no pain. There has not been meaningful pain since about the middle of March, and he could tell you the week.

And he still has the repeat, and he still fills it, and he still takes them, and if he is honest about why, it is not for a symptom. It is that stopping feels like walking out of a building without checking whether it has finished falling down.

Everybody thinks I got out in February. I am standing here in the wrappings.

And here is where I stop talking about Yaakov, because your illness ended too and something written for it did not, and everyone around you has already had the good afternoon.

Let me say the first thing carefully, because you are precise and you will notice if I am sloppy. What is on you now is not a relapse and it is not a new failing. It is a leftover, and leftovers are the most ordinary thing in the world after an illness, and there is a scene in Scripture about exactly this that almost nobody reads for what it says.

Alive, and still wrapped

Let me put the true thing down first, because it will change the picture you have of yourself.

You are not a man who failed to leave. You are a man who is alive and still wearing what was put on him when he was not. And the difference matters enormously, and it is written into the most famous rescue in the Gospels, in a detail people rush past: And it is the Holy Spirit who makes that land in you rather than merely read well.

And he that was dead came forth, bound hand and foot with graveclothes: and his face was bound about with a napkin. Jesus said to them, Loose him, and let him go.John 11:44

Stop at the sequence, because it is astonishing and it is exact.

He is alive. He is out. The word has already done the whole work: came forth is the miracle and it is complete. And he is still bound hand and foot, and his face is still covered, and that is not treated as a failure of the resurrection.

Then Christ says something He did not have to say, to people who were standing there: loose him. He raised the man Himself, alone, from outside the tomb. He hands the unwrapping to the community, out loud, as a job.

So the wrappings are not evidence that you are still dead, and Scripture is where I stand that rather than my own reading, and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying it into a man standing at a cupboard in the spring.

The loosing is somebody else's job

Now let me press the detail, because it is the practical half and it is aimed at you specifically.

Notice who Jesus does not tell to do the unwrapping.

He does not say Lazarus, get those off. The man is standing there wound hand and foot; he could not have done it if he tried, and everybody in that graveyard could see that. So the instruction goes to the people with free hands.

You have been trying to do a two person job on your own, with your own hands bound, and reading your failure to manage it as proof that you never really got out.

Hear this: you are alive, and the coming forth is finished, and the loosing was never assigned to the one in the wrappings. That is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it something you can hand over this week rather than something you find moving.

And now the practical half, and I will be exact, because getting it wrong is dangerous. Do not stop or reduce either of those two on your own, and especially not to prove that you are properly out. After eleven months on that shelf, some of these need a supervised taper, and one of them may be doing a job you have not attributed to it. Take it to the person who prescribes, and the sentence they need is the precise one you have: the pain resolved around the middle of March and I am still on these two, and stopping feels like leaving a building before it has finished falling down. That is a clinician's sentence and it is exactly what gets you a plan. And if you are ever in danger, if you have taken more than you meant to or the thought has turned toward not being here, get medical help now and tell one person today. In the United States you can call or text 988 at any hour. There are people awake right now.