Atrophy

I am concerned about atrophy, that steady decline into feebleness. Not physical atrophy, though. Not yet anyway. I’m worried that whatever metaphorical muscle that allows me to put thoughts and feelings into words will wither away. That one day I will sit down to write, brimming with ideas and passion, and find my fingers idly waiting for commands that will never come.

I tried to write something the other day. It was going to be a passionate and moving piece on the church and our place in it and Sunday Christians and weekday Christians and the false dichotomy separating them. The idea was pounding in my head. It was going to be great. I sat. And I typed this:

“I am the church.”

And then I typed some more. But the words were bad. Crooked. They took the ideas and ran the wrong way with them. I deleted them. I wrote more. They obscured the point. Delete. Write again. This time it was only the point, no emotion, no feeling. And the point without the feeling is just… well, it isn’t what it should be. I gave up. The passion was dim, the thoughts lost. The idea died on the vine. I think dying on the vine is a form of atrophy. 

At its core, atrophy is strength turned to weakness. It is the failure to do the task assigned or desired. If my muscles atrophy enough, I will no longer be able to carry my own weight. If the thing inside me that converts thoughts to words atrophies, I will be smothered by my own mind. The thought of being buried beneath my thoughts is unsettling in an oddly recursive way.

I had a young lady tell me a few weeks ago that she stopped going to my church because it was full of Sunday Christians. She meant it was full of people who say they are Christians, dress like Christians on Sunday, and live life as if they’d never heard of Christ Monday through Saturday. I wonder if maybe Sunday Christians are atrophied Christians. If the motive force behind their faith atrophied somewhere along the way, weakened, became a burden to itself.

But then I thought that maybe that’s all wrong. Because babies can’t lift themselves. And they can’t take care of themselves. And you certainly can’t send them off for six days without expecting bad results. What if the weakness inherent to newness was being misread as atrophy? How tragic to blame an infant for its lack of self-reliance. 

I think, probably, the truth is closer to the middle. That my church is full of baby Christians pooping themselves and atrophied Christians suffocating under the weight of who they used to be and the people in the middle trying to keep everyone poop-free and breathing. That doesn’t seem bad to me. It seems… real. Like, how any group of people would be expected to look when you got to know them. Imperfect but functional. 

I’m concerned about atrophy. About being able to do this…whatever this writing is. And about being about to do this church thing… whatever that is too. I’m concerned that one day I’ll find through age or neglect that I can no longer do the things I expect myself to do. So I choose to fight atrophy the only way I know how. But doing. By exercising the body, mind, and spirit. 

That piece I tried to write sort of mixed in with this one. I think I’m okay with that.