Three Stairs and Then Four

The rail is new. You can tell because the screws are still bright and there is a lighter rectangle of paint behind the top bracket where the old picture hook used to be. Errol's nephew put it up on a Saturday and would not take money for it.

Errol is fifty-eight. He was in the hospital for eleven months, and most of a body can come apart in eleven months. There was sepsis and then there was the ventilator and then there were the weeks he does not remember, which his wife does remember, all of them, in order.

He came home to a house he could not get around. The bed came downstairs into the front room. There is a chair in the shower now. The bathroom door does not close properly anymore because they took the frame off to get the chair in and never got it quite right after.

He counts stairs. That is the unit of measurement in this house, whether anybody says so or not.

Two years ago, he could stand at the bottom and go up three before his legs stopped being reliable and his wife's voice went up half a tone behind him.

This year, in April, he did four.

Four is not three. Four is a whole extra stair, and to get there he did the exercises on the sheet every morning for a year, including the mornings when it made him cry, including the week in November when he had a bad chest cold and did them sitting down.

The therapist wrote minimal change on the review sheet. She was not being unkind. She was being accurate against the scale she is required to use, and she said several encouraging things out loud that Errol did not hear because he was looking at the two words on the paper.

And when he told his daughter, in the kitchen, that he had done four, she said that's great, Dad, in the voice that people use, and then asked whether he wanted rice or potatoes.

He said potatoes. He is not angry with her. It is simply that nobody on this earth knows what four cost except him, and God.

If you have a number like that, that took you a year and that nobody could see, then stay here with me for a minute. You are standing on a real gain that no one in your house has the instrument to measure, and Proverbs 4:18 describes exactly this kind of increase, and it is the Holy Spirit who has been at work in you on every morning that felt like nothing was happening.

The verse describes an increase you cannot watch

Here is the anchor, and I want you to notice the mechanism inside it and not just the warmth of it.

But the path of the just is as the shining light, that shineth more and more unto the perfect day.Proverbs 4:18

The picture is dawn. Not a lamp being switched on. Dawn.

And here is what is true of dawn and of nothing else. No human being has ever watched a sunrise and been able to identify the moment it got brighter. You cannot see the increment. Stare at the east for ten minutes and you will not catch it happening at any point, and yet at the end of those ten minutes you can read a page you could not read at the start.

The change is entirely real and entirely imperceptible while it occurs. Both. That is not a poetic flourish laid over the top of the verse. That is the specific comparison the verse makes about the path of the just.

So when you say I cannot see anything happening, you are not reporting a failure. You are reporting the exact experience that Proverbs 4:18 says a person on this path has.

You are on a path that is genuinely getting brighter, and it is written in Proverbs 4:18 that it shines more and more, and the Holy Spirit has been increasing that light in you at a rate no eye in your kitchen was built to detect.

Four is not nothing. Four is more and more, arriving in the only unit your body currently trades in.

Direction is promised. Speed is not.

Now let me be very precise with you, because precision is the kindest thing I have to offer here.

Read the verse again and look for a rate. It is not there. More and more unto the perfect day gives you a direction and a destination, and it gives you no timetable whatsoever. Not a fast one and not a slow one.

Which means two things, and I want you to have both.

The first is that nobody who has put a schedule on your recovery got it from this text. Not the person who said you would be back to normal in a year. Not the well-meaning man at church who told you what his cousin managed in six months. Whatever they were working from, it was not Scripture, because Scripture did not issue one.

The second is that nothing here is going to tell you that you could make it come faster. You could not. There is no amount of wanting it more that moves a sunrise up. If anybody has hinted to you that a stalled recovery is a spiritual diagnosis, they were wrong, and they were wrong in a way that does real damage to people already lying on the floor of their own lives.

Do the therapy. Take the medication. Keep the appointments. That is where the work of the hands goes, and the God who made bodies is not offended by any of it.

And hear what He is actually doing. He is not issuing you a new body off a shelf. He is repairing the one that went through eleven months, and repair on an original is slower than manufacture in every craft there has ever been. Ask anybody who has ever fixed a thing rather than replaced it. That slowness is not a defect in the process. It is the signature of it.

You have a God who is working on the original and not on a substitute, and He promised in Proverbs 4:18 that the path shines more and more unto the perfect day, and it is the same Spirit who raised Christ who is doing the mending in you at the pace repair actually takes.