NeuroDivine

Reflections on today’s readings Psalm 16 | Isaiah 3:1-15 | Matthew 4:1-11from the dialysis chair.

Three and a half hours tethered to the machine again. The slow rhythm of blood and beeping, the quiet hum of survival. I read Psalm 16 and feel David’s certainty like a pulse beneath my own uncertainty. “You will not abandon me to the grave.” That line lands differently when your body is being filtered, when your mortality is not abstract but mechanical. And yet, there’s joy. Not the kind you chase, but the kind that finds you in the chair, in the stillness, in the knowing that presence is enough.

Isaiah 3 is harder. It’s a mirror held up to a society unravelling—leaders failing, the vulnerable crushed, arrogance parading as strength. I see it in the systems I navigate: the medical bureaucracy, the neurodivergent erasure, the way people look past suffering because it’s inconvenient. Isaiah doesn’t flinch. He names it. And maybe that’s the call today—not to fix it, not to escape it, but to name it. To say: this is unjust. This is broken. And still, I remain.

Then Matthew 4. Jesus in the wilderness. Hungry. Alone. Tempted. It’s not lost on me that the Spirit led him there. Not punishment, but preparation. And the enemy comes with cleverness: “If you are the Son of God…” That conditional poison. I hear echoes of it in my own mind sometimes—“If you were really loved, wouldn’t you be healed?” But Jesus doesn’t argue. He quotes truth. He stands firm. And maybe that’s the neurodivine gift: the ability to hold onto what’s real when everything else is spinning. To say, even in the dialysis chair, even in the wilderness: I am not alone. I am not forgotten. I am not less.

So I sit here, blood cycling, spirit listening. These texts don’t offer easy answers. They offer presence, clarity, and resistance. And that’s enough for today.