The Pain With No Name On It

There is a plastic wallet on the shelf above the fridge, the kind with a press stud that stopped pressing properly two years ago.

Inside it there is a letter from a physiotherapist. There is a letter from a rheumatology department beginning further to your recent attendance. There are three sets of blood results with a small tick beside every line, and a scan report with the word unremarkable in it, which is the strangest word anybody has ever used about her body. There is an appointment card for a clinic she has already been discharged from. There is a leaflet.

She has read every page in that wallet enough times to say them off by heart, and she keeps it because she is frightened that one day somebody will ask her to prove she has tried.

The pain is in her hip and her lower back and, for reasons nobody has explained, in the outside of her left forearm. It has been there for six years. It was there this morning when she put her feet down. It was there at half past two last night when she turned over. It has been at every birthday, every school run, every wedding she has stood at the back of because standing was easier than getting up again.

And nobody has ever given it a name.

That is the part she cannot make anyone understand. She is not asking for a cure at this point. She would settle for a word. A word would mean it is a thing. A word would mean she could say it in a sentence and watch the other person's face change from hmm to oh. Without the word she is just a woman who is tired a lot, and she can see people deciding what that means about her, and she has started deciding it about herself.

So she has stopped mentioning it. That is the quiet part. Somewhere in year three she noticed that saying my back is bad again had begun to cost more than it bought, and she stopped. She now answers fine with a smile she has practiced, and she puts the plastic wallet back on the shelf above the fridge, and she carries the whole thing alone, indefinitely, with no name on it.

Now let me stop calling her she.

Because you have a version of that wallet. Yours might be a folder on a laptop, or a note on your phone with the dates. And you have the same practiced fine, and the same six years, or four, or eleven, and the same feeling that if you cannot produce a diagnosis you are somehow not entitled to the sympathy.

Sit down. Take the weight off whichever side takes it. I want to say something to you before we go a step further.

The record you cannot get a copy of

I want to start where nobody starts with you, which is with this: I believe you.

Not as a kindness. As a statement of fact about the world. Pain is not less real for being unlabelled, and a body is not lying because the test is looking somewhere else. The word unremarkable on a report is a comment about an image on a screen. It is not a verdict on your life, it has never been a verdict on your life, and you were never wrong to keep going back.

Keep going back, by the way. Keep every appointment you have got. Nothing in this message asks you to loosen your grip on the people who are looking after you, and anybody who tells you that faith means letting go of your care has misread God and misread you.

Now here is the thing that will not fit in any wallet.

There is a man in the Scriptures who prayed three times about a pain in his body and did not get what he asked for. He was not a beginner. He had prayed for other people and seen extraordinary things happen. He asked for this to be taken away, three times, and the answer he got back was not the one he wanted.

And he said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness.2 Corinthians 12, verse 9

Read what he was actually given, because it is more than a consolation and it is easy to walk straight past.

He was not told to try harder. He was not told the pain was his own fault or a message about his faith. He was not told to wait quietly. He was told that there is a supply that is sufficient, present tense, right now, in the body he was actually living in. And then he was told something almost outrageous: that the place he was weakest was not the place God was absent. It was the place God's own strength came to rest.

You have spent years believing the opposite. You have believed that the undiagnosed part of you is the disqualified part. The part you do not bring anywhere. The part that has no paperwork and therefore no standing.

God does not need the paperwork. He was never waiting on the letter from the clinic to know what you carry.

There is a line in the Psalms where a man says God keeps his tears in a bottle and writes his wanderings in a book. That is a person saying: somebody is keeping the record. Not the abbreviated record, either. Not the record with a small tick beside every line. The whole thing. The half past two turns. The wedding you stood at the back of. The birthday you got through on paracetamol and willpower and never mentioned once.

There is a file on you and it is complete, and the one holding it does not need a name for your pain, because He already knows the whole of it by heart.