Held Together — Day 2: The Fire

Held Together · Day 2: The Fire
About 4 minutes. Listen, or read below.

Beloved,

Cut your finger, and within minutes your body launches a small, brilliant rescue. Blood flow increases. Immune cells rush in. The spot turns warm, red, and swollen. That is inflammation, and it is one of the most faithful things your body does. It is how you heal.

It was designed to be brief. It flares, it repairs, and it stands down.

The trouble starts when it doesn't stand down.

When inflammation runs low and constant for months or years, with no cut to heal and no infection to fight, just a steady simmer, it stops repairing and starts wearing things out. Researchers call it chronic low-grade inflammation, and it is associated with many of the conditions people fear most: heart disease, type 2 diabetes, joint pain, digestive trouble, autoimmune conditions, even depression.

You rarely feel it as fire. You feel it as stiffness you've written off as age. A gut that reacts to everything. An afternoon fog you push through with coffee. Weight that won't move no matter what you do right. A tiredness that sleep doesn't touch.

And because the most common inflammation marker isn't part of every routine checkup, it's possible to simmer for years with nothing flagged.

So what keeps the fire lit? The usual suspects are real: what we eat, how we sleep, how little we move, what we're exposed to. That's exactly why nourishment is built into every module of this curriculum.

But there's one fuel source almost no one talks about, and it's the one I see most in capable, high-functioning people.

Stress that never ends.

Your main stress hormone, cortisol, is actually supposed to help put inflammation out, and in the short term it does. But when the stress never stops (the caregiving, the leadership, the grief, the constant vigilance), the body's cells can become less responsive to cortisol's signal. It's the way you stop hearing an alarm that's been going off for years. The fire keeps burning because the message to stop isn't getting through.

Which raises the question we'll take on tomorrow: what if some of that stress isn't coming from your calendar at all? What if it's coming from something you survived a long time ago?

Scripture was ahead of the lab on this: "A merry heart does good, like medicine, but a broken spirit dries the bones" (Proverbs 17:22). The state of the spirit shows up in the body. That isn't only poetry. It's physiology.

Today, one thing: Look at your three symptoms from yesterday. Circle any that sound like the simmer I described. Most people circle at least two.

Dina

The Divine Design™ is the full curriculum: twenty modules, one body system at a time, taught three ways — the anatomy, the trauma science, and the Scripture.
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General wellness education from The Divine Design™ LLC. Not medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. In an emergency call 911; in crisis call or text 988.