My Body Decides How Much I Get

Your body decides and you find out afterward.

That is the thing that is hardest to explain to anybody who has not lived with it. It is not that you have less energy. It is that the amount is not known in advance, and it is not the same two days running, and it does not correspond to how much sleep you had or how careful you were.

So you cannot plan. Not because you are disorganized. Because the input to any plan is a number nobody has yet.

And every single piece of advice about doing anything in a house assumes a known quantity. Set aside two hours. Do a room a weekend. Build a habit and stick to it. All of it assumes a body that reports its capacity in advance and delivers what it promised.

I want to say something plainly before anything else, because a great deal of what gets said to people in your position is not honest.

I am not going to tell you that a good attitude changes what your body does. It does not. And a piece about a room is not the place to pretend otherwise.

What I am going to do is size something to a variable amount, which is a thing almost nobody bothers to design for, and it is entirely doable.

My strength is made perfect in weakness

There is a line in Corinthians that gets used badly and is worth reading exactly as it stands.

And he said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness. Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me. (2 Corinthians 12:9, King James Version)

My strength is made perfect in weakness. And notice whose strength it is.

You are somebody in whom a strength that is not your own is described as being made complete, and a weak body has never once been the wrong place for that to happen. 2 Corinthians 12:9 puts the perfecting in the weakness rather than after it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who says so to a woman who does not know what tomorrow will give her.

Now I want to be careful, because there is a cruel version of this verse and it has been said to people in your position by well meaning people for a long time.

The cruel version says the weakness is good, so stop minding it. Paul does not say that. He calls them infirmities, which is not a soft word, and the thorn he is describing is something he asked three times to have removed.

The verse is not a recommendation of illness. It is a statement about where a particular strength shows up, made by a man who had asked for the situation to be different and had been told no.

You are allowed to want a different body and still stand inside that verse, and a request that was not granted has never once put anybody outside it. The Spirit of God is the one who is honest with a person about her own condition, and it is written in 2 Corinthians 12:9 that Paul had asked and had been answered with sufficiency rather than removal.

Designed for a variable amount

Now the practical part, and this is the piece I actually came with.

Almost nothing is designed for a variable amount. That is the real problem, and it is a design problem rather than a personal one.

A plan that needs two hours fails on a bad day. A plan that needs twenty minutes fails on a bad day too, if the twenty minutes has to be completed, because completion is the thing your body will not guarantee.

So the design has to have two exits in it, and both have to count as finishing.

You are able to have an action with two honest endings in it, and stopping early has never once been the same thing as failing. The Holy Spirit is the one who designs to what a person actually has, and 2 Corinthians 12:9 puts the sufficiency in the grace rather than in the capacity.

And here is the second half of the design, and it is the one that makes it survive a bad week.

It has to be repeatable after a gap. Most systems die on the gap. You do it three times, then there are nine days when your body gives you nothing, and by day ten the thing has become a thing you failed at rather than a thing you do.

So the action has to be one that can be picked up on day ten as though nothing happened, which means it cannot have any momentum built into it. No streaks. No chains. No sense that the fourth session is worth more because the first three were consecutive.

You are able to have something that survives a nine day gap, and a gap has never once been able to break an action that was never a streak. The Spirit of God is the one who is present on the tenth day exactly as on the first, and it is written in 2 Corinthians 12:9 that the grace is sufficient rather than the person.

And this, plainly, in these words. That room is not a report on you. Not on your effort, not on your willingness, not on your character. A room a woman with an illness has not got to is not a verdict on the woman, and I am not going to allow it to be read that way while she is sitting in it.

You are a woman whose worth was settled a long way from a corner of a room, and what a body did not allow has never once been a statement about who somebody is. 2 Corinthians 12:9 puts the sufficiency in God's grace in 2 Corinthians 12, and the same Spirit who inspired that line is in the room with you.

Twenty minutes, or your body, whichever comes first

So here is the assignment, and the second exit is the whole design.

Pick one corner, set a timer for twenty minutes, sit down in it, and stop at the timer or at your body, whichever comes first.

Sit down. Bring a chair or sit on the floor if that is easier, and work only within reach, because standing and reaching is where the cost is.

Twenty minutes on a timer.

You are working sitting down inside arm's reach, and a chair has never once made a piece of work smaller than the same work done standing. The Holy Spirit is the one who is with a woman working within her actual reach, and 2 Corinthians 12:9 locates the sufficiency in grace rather than in strength.

And now the important half.

Stop at the timer, or stop at your body, whichever comes first. Both of those are the end of the session. Not one of them is the real ending and the other a shortfall.

If you get four minutes, the session was four minutes and it is finished. Not attempted. Finished. Say it, if it helps, out loud, because the accounting has to actually change and thinking about it does not change it.

And if nine days go by, the tenth day is not day one again and it is not a restart. It is the next session, and it counts exactly the same as it would have counted on the second day.

You are ending a session at whichever exit arrives and calling both of them finished, and four minutes has never once been an attempt rather than a session. The Spirit of God is the one who counts what actually happened, and it is written in 2 Corinthians 12:9 that His strength is made perfect in weakness rather than in spite of it.