Going Is Not Giving Up

I will say what this site says at the top of everything: this is not medicine, and nothing here is treatment. But this particular article has one job, and the job is not comfort. It is to get you to pick up a phone today.

You have been telling yourself it will pass. You have been telling yourself that since about last winter.

And you have got quite good at it. You have a way of thinking about it that lasts almost exactly as long as it takes to think about something else. You have noticed that it has not gone. You have decided, several times, in a serious voice, that if it is still there next month you will do something, and then next month came and you renegotiated.

I am not going to ask you what it is. That is not my business and I could not do anything about it anyway. I am going to talk about the not going, because I think I know what is underneath it, and I think naming it takes about half its power away.

Jesus names the physician as normal

There is a line where Jesus is being criticized for the company He keeps, and He answers with a comparison so ordinary that we skip over what it assumes.

But when Jesus heard that, he said unto them, They that be whole need not a physician, but they that are sick. (Matthew 9:12, King James Version)

He is making a point about sinners, not about medicine. But look at what He takes for granted while He makes it.

Sick people go to physicians. That is the assumption underneath the whole sentence. It is so normal to Him that He can use it as the obvious half of an illustration, the way you would say that thirsty people drink.

There is no hint anywhere in it that going is a lesser road, or a lack of faith, or a failure of trust. It is simply what people who are unwell do. He builds an argument on it.

You are doing the ordinary and expected thing when you go, and heaven has never once treated that as second best. Matthew 9:12 has Jesus assume that sick people see physicians and use it as the obvious half of His own illustration, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that read as permission rather than as a technicality.

What is actually stopping you

Now, the real reason, and I want to say it gently because I have been here.

It is not laziness and it is not stoicism. It is that at the moment you are in a world where you might be fine, and after the appointment you will be in a world where you know.

While it is unexamined it is only a possibility. Once somebody looks at it, it becomes a fact, and facts cannot be put back. Matthew 9:12 puts the sick person in front of the physician without one word of hesitation in it, and the Holy Spirit is not frightened of a fact. So a person can spend eleven months preserving a maybe, and the whole time they will describe what they are doing as not making a fuss.

I understand it completely. And it does not work, because the fear does not stay still while you wait. It grows in the dark, and by month eleven you are not avoiding an appointment any more, you are living inside a low permanent dread that is costing you more than the appointment ever would.

You are not making a fuss, and the fear has never once got smaller by being left alone. The written word says they that be whole need not a physician but they that are sick, which places the sick person in the chair as a matter of course, and the Spirit of God is the one who walks in with somebody who is frightened of what they will be told.

Two things I am not going to say

I want to be honest about the limits here, because this is exactly where sites like this go wrong.

I am not going to tell you what they are going to say. I do not know that. Nobody who says it knows that, and I am not going to buy your obedience with a promise I cannot keep.

And I am not going to tell you that praying about it is an alternative to going. Pray, absolutely, and go. Those are not two roads with a choice between them. The prayer is not the substitute and the appointment is not the failure of faith.

What I will tell you is what the word actually settles: that God is with you either way, that going is normal, and that nothing you find out changes where you stand with Him.

You are held whichever answer comes, and no result has ever once altered whose you are. Matthew 9:12 has Christ speaking as the physician of the sick rather than the accuser of them, and the Holy Spirit is the one who goes into an appointment with a person and comes out with them.

The two numbers I will give you

Before I say anything else about the phone in your hand, here is the plain routing, and it does not change from article to article on this site.

If something is happening right now and you are frightened, that is 911, and it is now rather than after you have thought about it. If what is heavy tonight is in your own mind, 988 answers, and it is a person and not a recording. And the appointment we have been talking about is a doctor, a nurse or a pharmacist, and it is a phone call that takes less time than reading this page has.

You are not required to have earned an appointment, and nobody has ever once been turned away for coming too early. The Spirit of God is the one who gets a frightened person as far as the phone, and Matthew 9:12 has Christ put the sick person in front of the physician as the most ordinary arrangement in the world.

I am not telling you which of those numbers is yours. I am not able to and I would be wrong to try. I am telling you they exist and that none of them require you to have worked out how bad anything is first.

You have a way through this that does not depend on you working out what is wrong first. Matthew 9:12 puts the whole weight of the deciding on the physician and none of it on the sick, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes the assessing out of the hands of a person who was never given it.