The Hidden Life Within Us
A day ago, I rose in the early hours of the morning, hurrying down a bowl of porridge before the PET scan fasting window began. Patients are instructed not to eat for six hours beforehand — four for diabetics. There was something sobering about the whole ritual: the silence of the hour, the waiting, the sudden awareness of one’s own body as something vulnerable and uncertain.
When I arrived at the Gartnavel Hospital in Glasgow, what struck me first was not the machinery or the clinical atmosphere, but the kindness of the reception staff, nurses, and radiographers. Their gentleness lingered with me throughout the morning. In places where people quietly carry fear, kindness acquires a deeper meaning. It becomes more than courtesy; it becomes a form of shared humanity.
A PET scan is a remarkable piece of technology. Positron Emission Tomography allows doctors to look beyond the outward structure of the body and observe its hidden activity. A radioactive tracer, similar to sugar, is injected into the bloodstream. Since cancer cells consume energy more rapidly than healthy cells, they absorb more of the tracer and reveal themselves as bright areas on the scan.
It is astonishing that human beings have developed instruments capable of searching so deeply into the body, illuminating what would otherwise remain unseen. Yet for all its sophistication, the scan reaches only into flesh. It cannot penetrate the inner life of a person — the hidden region of conscience, memory, regret, longing, love, or fear. Science may identify diseased cells, but it cannot measure sorrow, hope, forgiveness, or grace.
That hidden country belongs to God alone.
While waiting that morning, my thoughts turned to Psalm 139:
“Search me, O God, and know my heart;
test me and know my concerns.
See if there is any offensive way in me;
lead me in the way everlasting.”
There is something profoundly unsettling in those words. David is asking not merely to be examined, but to be known completely. Most of us spend much of our lives partially hidden, even from ourselves. We soften guilt, disguise motives, bury old wounds beneath routine, noise, and distraction. Yet before God there is no performance to maintain, no image to curate. The soul stands exposed.
Illness has a way of stripping away illusion. It reminds us that we are finite creatures moving through time toward an unknown horizon. Modern life encourages the fantasy of control, but a hospital waiting room reveals how fragile human existence really is. Beneath ambition, appearance, and daily distraction lies the same quiet question each person must eventually confront: what does it mean to live truthfully before God and before one another?
As a child at St Anthony’s Primary in Govan, Glasgow, I remember the nuns speaking about humanity being made in the image of God. At the time I understood it only dimly. Later in life I came to see that this likeness is reflected not in power or achievement, but in qualities such as mercy, compassion, patience, kindness, and love — the fruits of the spirit described in Galatians 5.
That morning, I found myself recalling a conversation with one of the radiographers about family life and the difficulty of raising children through their teenage years. It struck me that perhaps the deepest spiritual truths are encountered not in grand theories, but in ordinary relationships. The daily struggle to remain patient, forgiving, gentle, and loving in a wounded world may itself be part of the soul’s formation.
There is also something mysterious about goodness. Kindness does not merely comfort the receiver; it enlarges the giver. Compassion deepens the inner life. Love, when sincerely offered, seems to draw human beings beyond themselves. In this sense, the personality of God is not only something to admire, but something we are invited to participate in.
We are living in a fractured world marked by loneliness, division, and spiritual exhaustion. Yet even now, grace continues to break through: in a nurse’s reassuring voice, in a conversation between strangers, in the patience of a parent, in the quiet dignity of those who carry suffering without bitterness.
Perhaps that is part of what it means to be human, not simply to survive, but to reflect, however imperfectly, something eternal within the briefness of our lives.
Verses from the BSB Bible