My Flesh and My Heart Faileth Is Written by Somebody Still There

There is a kind of loss nobody sends a card for.

A man loses a job and people show up. A man loses a person and people show up. A man loses about fifteen per cent of his own memory and there is no occasion for it, no word for it, and no acceptable way to raise it at a table.

I know two people living inside that and they describe it almost identically. It is not the forgetting that gets them. It is the moment in a conversation where they know the word is gone, and the four seconds of covering for it, and the way the other person's face changes very slightly and then changes back.

One of them told me the worst part is that he has started declining things. Not because he cannot do them. Because he does not trust himself to finish them in front of anybody.

There is a psalm about failing that is written from the inside of it, and the thing that makes it useful is the tense.

Both halves, in one sentence

Here is the verse.

My flesh and my heart faileth: but God is the strength of my heart, and my portion for ever. (Psalm 73:26, King James Version)

Faileth. Present tense, ongoing, currently happening. He is not describing something he got through. He is writing from inside it.

And there is no attempt anywhere in that verse to soften the first half. He does not say his flesh sometimes feels like it is failing. He says it is.

Then: but God is the strength of my heart. The word for heart appears twice in one verse, once as the thing failing and once as the thing being strengthened, which is a deliberate move. He is saying that the same organ described as failing has a strength attached to it that is not its own.

And my portion for ever. A portion, in that world, was your allotted share of land, the thing that stayed yours no matter what a season did.

You are failing in one clause and supplied in the next, and the psalm puts both in one sentence on purpose. Psalm 73:26 says my flesh and my heart faileth: but God is the strength of my heart, and it is the Spirit of God, Ephesians 3:16 strengthening with might in the inner man, who is named for a strengthening that is not located in the equipment.

The prayer of a man who can feel it going

There is a psalm that says the specific fear out loud, and I have never heard it read at a service.

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

When my strength faileth. He is not worried about dying. He is worried about being set aside once he stops being useful, and he is honest enough to say it to God directly.

That is the fear underneath the declining. My friend who stopped accepting invitations is not afraid of forgetting a word. He is afraid of being quietly reclassified.

And the answer God gives to that exact fear is one of the most specific promises in Isaiah:

And even to your old age I am he; and even to hoar hairs will I carry you: I have made, and I will bear; even I will carry, and will deliver you. (Isaiah 46:4)

Four verbs about carrying in one verse. Not four verbs about improving. Carrying is what you do with something that cannot walk it itself, and God uses the word four times in a row.

You are being carried rather than assessed for usefulness. Isaiah 46:4 says I have made, and I will bear; even I will carry, and will deliver you. It is His Spirit, Romans 8:26 helping our infirmities, who does the carrying inside a person that no arrangement outside them can.

The one that is renewed and the one that is not

Paul writes a sentence that is unusually blunt about the direction of travel, and it is a comfort precisely because it does not lie.

For which cause we faint not; but though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day. (2 Corinthians 4:16)

Though our outward man perish. He does not dispute it. He grants it, in the strongest word available, and then puts something else beside it.

Notice that he does not say the outward man is renewed. He is careful. Two different things are described, going in two different directions, at the same time, in the same person.

Which is exactly what my friends are living. Something is genuinely going. Something else is genuinely being renewed, daily, and it is not the thing that is going, and pretending the first is not happening would make the second unbelievable.

You have something being renewed daily that is not the thing you can feel going. 2 Corinthians 4:16 puts the perishing and the renewing in one sentence without pretending about either. It is the Holy Spirit, Titus 3:5 named in the renewing of the Holy Ghost, who is named for the renewing rather than the repair.

What Paul says he can do, and where the strength is from

There is a verse people put on sports equipment, and reading it in context changes it into something a person with a failing memory can actually use.

I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me. (Philippians 4:13)

The verses immediately before it are about knowing how to be full and how to be hungry, how to abound and how to suffer need. He is not talking about achievement. He is talking about capacity to be in a state.

Through Christ which strengtheneth me. The strength is described as coming through somebody, present tense, ongoing, rather than as a reserve inside Paul that he draws on.

So the promise is not that a person will be as capable as they were. It is that the capacity to be in the state they are actually in is supplied from outside them and continuously.

You are supplied continuously from outside rather than drawing on a reserve that is running down. Philippians 4:13 says through Christ which strengtheneth me in the present tense, and it is the same Spirit, Galatians 5:22 naming longsuffering as fruit rather than as effort, who supplies the enduring a person cannot manufacture.

And if the losses have started to press on you at night in a way that is bigger than the losses themselves, say it out loud to a person: a doctor, a counselor, a pastor you trust, or the 988 crisis line, which answers every hour there is. Grief with no name and no occasion attached is the kind that stays private, and private is what makes it heavy.