The Last Length of the Session

The lane swim finishes at nine and the lifeguard starts winding the ropes in at four minutes to, which everybody knows and nobody obeys, and there are eleven people still in the water.

Nadia is on her last length and she is going slowly on purpose.

She is twenty-three. She has been coming on Tuesdays since March. She is not good at this, in the sense that nobody is going to ask her to race anybody, and she likes that about it: it is the one thing in her week that she does badly and keeps doing.

She started because a friend asked. She kept going for a completely different reason, which she has never said out loud to anybody, and the reason is that for about forty minutes every Tuesday her head goes quiet.

It is the only place it happens. Not in bed. Not in a service. Not on a walk, where the head simply comes along. Here, in a chlorinated municipal pool with a fluorescent tube flickering over lane two, somewhere around the fifteenth length, the noise stops.

She has a theology about her body and she got it early and nobody handed it to her deliberately. It goes: the soul is the part God deals with, and the body is the part that lets you down. Her body gets tired. It wants things she has decided against. It gets ill. It embarrasses her. It is, in her settled and unexamined view, the part of the arrangement that has to be managed so that the real part can get on.

She is not miserable about it. She would not even recognize it as a belief. It is just the floor plan.

Last length. Arms going over, breathing every four, the tiles going past underneath.

And what arrives, in the fourth to last stroke, unaccompanied by anything spiritual at all, is this: the quiet did not come from thinking. She did not reason her way into it. She has never once managed to reason her way into it.

It came through her arms.

Forty minutes of the part she does not trust carried her into the only quiet she gets all week.

You have that floor plan. Yours might not involve water. But you know which part of yourself you have filed as the liability, and you have probably never once noticed that God has been reaching you through it.

Paul's word for it is anatomical

Romans 6 is where Paul deals with what to do now that you have been made alive, and the sentence I want in your hands is startlingly physical.

Neither yield ye your members as instruments of unrighteousness unto sin: but yield yourselves unto God, as those that are alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness unto God.Romans 6:13

Members. That word in English has gone abstract on us, and in the Greek it has not gone anywhere. It means limbs. Parts of a body. Arms, hands, feet, back, tongue, eyes. Paul is not talking about your capacities in general. He is talking about the things you are lying on and standing on and reaching with.

You have members, and Scripture asks for them by name, and it is already settled that they are wanted. That is the written word and not my encouragement at a poolside, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a line from the middle of Romans and lays it in lane two at four minutes to nine.

And then the noun he attaches to them. Instruments.

The word behind it means tools, or weapons: the equipment a person does actual work with. It is not the language of liability. Nobody describes a problem as an instrument. An instrument is the thing you cannot do the job without, and Paul hands the word to your arms.

Yield is not the same as subdue

Now the verb, because the verb decides the whole relationship. Yield.

You have been managing. That is what the floor plan produces: a permanent low-level operation of keeping a difficult thing in check, an internal border force. Manage the tiredness, manage the wanting, manage the embarrassment.

Paul does not say subdue your members. He says yield them, which is what you do with something you are handing over for use. You yield a tool to somebody who is going to work with it. There is no fight in the word at all.

You are able to yield rather than manage, and it is already yours to do, right now, as you read. Romans 6 says yield twice in one verse and never once says manage, and the same Spirit who raised Christ from the dead is the one making that a present fact in a young woman with her hair under a cap.

And then the ground underneath it, which is the phrase in the middle: as those that are alive from the dead. Present tense. Already true. Paul does not ask you to yield in order to become alive. He tells you that you are alive and asks you to yield accordingly.

Now let me guard this carefully, because this category is where careless writing does real harm.

I am not handing you a program and there is nothing in this message about what you should eat or how you should look or what you should do with your Tuesdays. That is not what this site does and it is not what Romans 6 does either. If you are reading this from a bed you cannot get out of, or in a body that has stopped doing a thing it used to do, or in a body that has never done it, none of what I have said gets smaller. Members are members. Yielding is available to a hand that cannot close.

And your body is not being defended here on the grounds that it is impressive. That is the other ditch, and it is just as far off the road. The verse does not say your members are excellent. It says they are instruments, and an instrument is valued for whose hand it is in.