Touched With the Feeling of Our Infirmities Covers the Invisible Ones

The two most exhausting words in the language, for a certain kind of person, are: you look fine.

They are always meant kindly. That is what makes them impossible to answer. Nobody says them to be cruel. They are said by people who are pleased to see you, and there is no reply that is both honest and socially survivable.

A woman told me she has three versions of an explanation, calibrated by audience, and that she has given one of them about four hundred times, and that she can now tell within two sentences whether the person is going to believe it.

She said the tiredness of explaining is worse than the condition on most days. She said it about her own family.

And then she said the thing that made me want to write this, which is that she has started to doubt herself. Not the diagnosis. Her own experience of her own body, because so many people have looked at her and been quietly unconvinced.

There is a verse in Hebrews about a knowledge that does not require evidence, and it is the most useful verse I know for anybody in that room.

The word is not sympathy

Here it is.

For we have not an high priest which cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities; but was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin. (Hebrews 4:15, King James Version)

Touched with the feeling of. The Greek word behind that is where we get sympathy, and it means to suffer alongside, to feel the same thing at the same time.

It is not: He is aware of. It is not: He takes your word for it. It is a shared sensation, which is a completely different category from belief.

Which means the transaction a person keeps having to run with other people does not run with Him. There is no explanation stage. There is nothing to be convincing about, because the knowledge does not arrive through testimony.

And the writer states it as a negative on purpose: not an high priest which cannot. He is answering an objection somebody had already made.

You are not required to be believed by Him, because the knowing does not run on evidence. Hebrews 4:15 says touched with the feeling of our infirmities, which is a shared sensation rather than a verdict, and it is the same Spirit, Romans 8:26 helping our infirmities, who uses the same word in the same category.

David says the thing you cannot get across

There is a line in a psalm that is written by somebody who has run out of ways to explain himself.

Lord, all my desire is before thee; and my groaning is not hid from thee. (Psalm 38:9)

My groaning is not hid from thee. He is not describing something he communicated successfully. He is describing something that got there without being communicated.

Read the psalm around it and it is full of people getting it wrong about him. His friends stand aloof. His acquaintances stand afar off. People are drawing conclusions.

And in the middle of that he says one thing to God that he apparently cannot say to anybody else, which is that it is already through.

That is the relief in this. Not that God agrees with your account. That there is no account to give.

You have something that got through without being explained. Psalm 38:9 says my groaning is not hid from thee. It is the Spirit of God, Romans 8:26 making intercession with groanings which cannot be uttered, who carries what a person has no successful words for.

He asks the man at the pool rather than assuming

There is a moment I keep coming back to because of what it does not do.

Jesus sees a man who has been ill thirty eight years, and He knows the history, and the text says so. And He asks him a question:

Wilt thou be made whole? (John 5:6)

He asks. He does not diagnose him at a distance, and He does not tell him what he must be feeling, and He does not open with an opinion about his situation.

For somebody who has spent years being told what their condition is by people who do not have it, that detail is enormous. He is the one Person in the story entitled to skip the question, and He asks it anyway.

And when the man answers with logistics rather than yes, Jesus does not correct the answer either.

You are being asked rather than assessed. John 5:6 has Him asking a man of thirty eight years what he wants instead of telling him. It is His Spirit, John 16:13 who guides into all truth, who does the knowing that never once needs a person to perform their evidence.

What the psalm says about the ordinary parts of a day

And there is a line in Psalm 139 that covers the specific thing that cannot be explained to anybody, which is what the days are actually like.

Thou compassest my path and my lying down, and art acquainted with all my ways. (Psalm 139:3)

My path and my lying down. Both the moving and the not moving. The bits that look like a life and the bits that look like nothing, which for a person with an invisible condition is the entire problem, because the second category is invisible by definition.

Acquainted with all my ways. Acquainted is a word about familiarity over time. It is not a scan. It is the knowledge somebody has from being around.

So the parts of the week nobody sees are not the parts God has to be told about. They are the parts He is described as being familiar with.

You are known in the parts of the week that nobody sees. Psalm 139:3 says thou compassest my path and my lying down, and art acquainted with all my ways, and it is the Holy Spirit, 1 Corinthians 2:10 searching all things, who is described as the one doing the knowing.

And if the doubt from other people has started to make you doubt your own experience, say that out loud to a person who will take it seriously: a doctor, a counselor, a pastor you trust, or the 988 crisis line, which answers every hour there is. Being disbelieved for years does real damage, and that damage is worth treating on its own terms.