The Ground That Will Not Come Level

Everybody keeps saying how well she looks, and she does, and she is, and she says thank you and means it.

The illness took fourteen months. There was the diagnosis and the treatment and the stretch in the middle where she could not work, and then the slow part afterwards that nobody warns you about, where you are technically fine and your body has not read the memo.

She is back now. Full time since March. She is good at her job and they were decent to her, more decent than a lot of places would have been.

And the ground will not come level.

That is the only way she can describe it. There is the credit card from the six months of no income. There is the car that had to be replaced in the middle of it because the old one failed at the worst possible moment. There is the thing that went on the flat that she has been paying since. And every month she does what she can and it moves by about as much as a tide moves a stone, and then something else happens, because something else always happens.

She was in the bathroom at work in June doing the sum on her phone, and the sentence arrived fully formed: I am going to be paying for being ill for the rest of my life.

That is the one that has been sitting on her since. Not the debt. The idea that a thing that happened to her body, that she did not choose, that she fought, has turned into a bill that will still be running when she is sixty.

She has not said it to anybody, because everybody is so pleased she is well.

You know that bathroom. Yours might be an accident, or a breakdown, or a year looking after somebody who needed you. Something happened that was not your fault, and the fallout has outlasted the event by years, and there is a version of it now that has begun to feel like a punishment nobody would ever admit to handing down.

Come here, sit down, let the music go on in the other room. There is a day when Jesus stood up in His own town and read a passage out loud, and I want you to hear which words He picked.

There is no code, and there is an acceptable year

Let me say the plain thing first, because the name over this door promises a secret and I am not standing in front of a woman fourteen months out of treatment and dangling one.

There is no code. There is nothing in Scripture that clears what the illness cost, and I am not going to tell you that God is about to wipe those balances, because I have not been told that and nobody honest will say they have. Nothing here promises a reversal and nothing here dates one.

Now, here is the day. He is thirty and He is home, in the town where everybody knew Him as a boy, and He is handed the scroll and He picks the passage.

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, to preach the acceptable year of the Lord.Luke 4:18-19

Every clause in there is about somebody who is under something. Poor. Brokenhearted. Captive. Blind. Bruised. And the phrase He lands on at the end, the acceptable year of the Lord, is jubilee language. It is the year everything that had accumulated against a person was released.

And notice this. He does not read out a list of people who got themselves into trouble. Every category in that verse is a condition somebody is in, and most of them are conditions nobody chose. He was not standing up to announce a scheme for the deserving. He announced a year.

And then He sat down and said that it was fulfilled that day in their ears. Today. Not eventually.

You are not under a bill for having been ill, and nothing in that passage sorts people by whether their trouble was their own fault. That is not a comfort I have arranged in a hall. It is written into Luke 4, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes the day He picked His own passage and lays it beside a woman doing a sum on her phone in a bathroom at work.

You have a God who announces released years over the bruised, and He has never once sent anybody an invoice for what happened to their body. Scripture says to set at liberty them that are bruised, which is a word for people who were struck rather than people who fell, and His Spirit is the one who makes that distinction land in a chest.

Now let me teach you the hard part, because comfort alone will not hold this.

The sentence in the bathroom did something specific. It converted a debt into a verdict. A debt is a number and numbers change. A verdict is a judgement about a life, and once a number becomes a verdict it stops being something you are dealing with and becomes something you are.

And there is a second thing, quieter. You have not been able to say any of this out loud because everybody is delighted you are well, and there is no socially available way to say I am well and I am drowning. So you have been carrying a verdict in silence in a room full of people who love you and are celebrating.

You are not being punished, and getting well was never the end of what you were owed by way of care. Scripture says He healeth the broken in heart and bindeth up their wounds, and binding up is what happens after the wound, which is exactly the part of this that nobody has been attending to, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that and makes it a hand on a shoulder.

And now what I owe you about your mouth, because a verdict does not lift because a friend was warm to you over food. Jesus said faith the size of a mustard seed, spoken to a mountain, does what carrying on well never does. So speak, out loud, in this room. You have the standing to speak to a verdict and tell it what it is not, because you are in Christ and Christ is in you, and Scripture calls that yours by position rather than by health, and the Holy Spirit takes a spoken word much further than a hall.