I Used To Be The One Who Could

You went up the stairs at your daughter's place last weekend and you noticed it.

Not a stumble. Nothing anybody saw. You got to the top and there was a small pause before you said the next thing, and inside that pause you were doing a piece of arithmetic you did not consent to.

You know exactly what you could do at twenty five. You could carry a person up those stairs at twenty five.

And the thing that follows is not really about stairs. It is a running comparison that is on all day, every day, between the man in this body and a man who does not exist any more, and the man who does not exist wins every single time, because he is remembered and remembered men do not get tired.

Nobody knows you do this. You would not know how to bring it up. There is no sentence for it that does not sound like self pity, and you would rather carry it than say something that sounds like that.

So let me do two things in this article, and neither of them is going to be the thing you are braced for.

I am not going to tell you it can come back. I do not know that and neither does anybody else, and a man who is grieving does not need a stranger making promises about his knees.

And I am not going to tell you it does not matter. It matters. Something real has gone and you are allowed to feel the size of it.

What I am going to do is get the comparison switched off for ten minutes.

Cast me not off in the time of old age

There is a prayer in the psalms that most people skip, and it is one of the few places anybody says this out loud.

Cast me not off in the time of old age; forsake me not when my strength faileth. (Psalm 71:9, King James Version)

Cast me not off in the time of old age; forsake me not when my strength fails.

Read what that man is actually afraid of. Not death. Not pain. He is afraid of becoming irrelevant to God at the exact moment he stops being able to do things.

You have a fear that a psalm writer had first, and Psalm 71:9 has never once treated it as a shameful thing for a man to say. The prayer names the failing of strength without apologizing for minding it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present with a man who has just noticed something about a staircase.

You have been carrying this as though it were a weakness of character. Here it is in the book, spoken by a man God did not correct.

And notice that he does not pretend. He does not say my strength is fine. He does not say I am as good as I ever was. He says it is failing, plainly, as a fact about his life, and then he asks for the one thing he actually wants, which is not to be discarded.

That is grief without self pity, and it is a model. He names the loss and he does not build a whole identity out of it.

You are able to say the true sentence about what your body can do now, and saying it has never once been the same thing as giving up. The Spirit of God is the one who stays close to a man whose strength is going, and Psalm 71:9 says so as a request rather than as a complaint.

Which brings us to the actual mechanism of the pain, because the pain is not in the loss. It is in the comparison.

The comparison is the injury

Here is what is actually happening to you, and it is worth being precise about.

The body you have is not causing you suffering. It is doing its work. It got you up those stairs.

You are suffering from a measurement rather than from a limitation, and Psalm 71:9 has never once asked a man to score himself against his own younger self. The psalm asks not to be cast off and says nothing at all about comparison, and the Holy Spirit is the one who quiets a running total that has been going for years.

You have a scoreboard running that nobody else can see, and it only ever gives one result. The man at twenty five did not have a bad night's sleep. He is not carrying eleven years of a job. He is a highlight and you are comparing a Tuesday to a highlight.

And here is the part that will annoy you slightly, because it is true. Everybody your age is doing this. Every single one of them thinks he is the only one, and every one of them has decided not to mention it, which is why none of you know.

So the work is not on the body. The work is on the scoreboard.

You have permission to take the comparison out of today's ten minutes, and doing that has never once been the same thing as pretending nothing happened. Psalm 71:9 asks for one thing only, which is not to be forsaken, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes a measurement out of a man's hands.

You cannot switch it off with an argument. It has been running for years. What you can do is take away the input for ten minutes, which is what the next part is.

Stop while it is still easy

Here is the assignment, and the second half of it is the whole medicine.

Do one thing today that this body can do. And stop while it is still easy.

You are able to finish something before it becomes a test, and stopping early has never once been the same thing as quitting. It is written that a man asked God not to forsake him when his strength failed, and the Holy Spirit is the one who gives a man permission to stop before he has proved anything.

Every man reading this wants to know what the thing is. Almost anything. Walk to the end of the road. Go up and down the stairs twice on purpose. Throw something in the driveway for ten minutes with one of them.

The activity does not matter. The stopping does.

Because here is the habit nobody notices in themselves. A man goes out, does the thing, and keeps going until he finds the edge, because he needs to know where the edge is now. Then he comes back in having located his own limit, which is another entry on the scoreboard, and he feels worse than before he went out.

So you stop before that. At the point where it is still easy. When you could clearly do more.

You have been ending every effort at the exact spot that hurts, and Psalm 71:9 has never once required a man to locate his own limit in order to be honest about it. The Spirit of God is the one who is with a man walking back up his own path with something left in the tank, and the psalm asks only that God not cast him off.

It will feel wrong the first four times. It will feel like cheating.

Do it anyway. What is actually happening is that today's measurement never gets taken, and after a couple of weeks with nothing to record, the scoreboard gets quieter, because nothing is feeding it.