Talk About Trouble: Chapter 2

What mesmerizes me about the book of Job is that it turns out human theology, human reasoning, human religion has stayed almost entirely the same in the thousands of years since this literary masterpiece was written. I could have written entire passages of this book myself, though not as eloquently, because I have felt them. I know exactly how these people feel. I have experiences, moments in my life, that I can attach these words to, and they FIT. Thousands of years of surface changes later – changes of technology, fashion, government, trends, languages, foods, and lifestyles – and the thoughts and feelings of humans remain unchanged. That’s why I am enamored by old literature. We are more alike with the people of the past than we will ever know.

I’m still not talking about Job. But his wife… well. She is definitely relatable.

Sometimes we forget that Job did not suffer all these tragedies alone. There’s another character in this story who just got caught in the crosshairs, unfortunate human collateral, and she serves as a contrast to show how most of us would have responded under similar circumstances. The “control” of the experiment, if you will: Job’s wife. At the beginning of chapter one, Job’s wife was a wealthy woman with ten healthy, happy children and the kindest, most generous husband in all the land. By the end of chapter one, she was destitute and bereft, and that wasn’t even enough for the Accuser. Job lost everything he had (except, notably, his wife, who seems to have been protected under the umbrella of “don’t harm him physically” – after all, “the two shall become one flesh”), and still, the Accuser claimed he only passed the first experiment because it wasn’t a good enough test.

Satan replied to the Lord, “Skin for skin! A man will give up everything he has to save his life. But reach out and take away his health, and he will surely curse you to your face!” (Job 2:4-5)

So Job is tested again in a way that challenges our understanding of fairness. Job would later describe his affliction in these unpleasantly descriptive terms:

My body is covered with maggots and scabs.
My skin breaks open, oozing with pus. (Job 7:5)

Lest we should think his illness a mild one – it wasn’t.

It is so easy to look at Job’s wife and judge her for what she says to him. This is literally her only moment that is preserved for all of history to judge – and it is her absolute lowest. It is so easy to forget that this woman is traumatized and grieving, in shock, and watching the best man she’s ever known suffer the agony of these horrific sores. His flesh is literally rotting. She loves him, I am convinced she must given who he is, and she is watching him live painfully and die slowly. What would I say to my own husband, who I love completely, in this moment? I would be desperate to stop his suffering, and I believe she is also a desperate woman. Desperate women are prone to saying wrong and foolish things, that’s true. I have been a desperate woman, too. And wow would I hate to be remembered as nothing but my lowest moment.

So remember that’s where she is when she says –

His wife said to him, “Are you still trying to maintain your integrity? Curse God and die.” (Job 2:8)

And so we arrive at the second pinch point of the story. Again, Job is faced with a choice, and in about 15 seconds, after he makes that choice, all of heaven is going to know who he is – for certain this time. That’s how long it takes to make a choice that makes or breaks us. I have always marveled at how long the consequences can last for a decision that takes so little time to make. These knee-jerk reaction choices we make come from within us and reveal us like nothing else does. I crumple when I think of some that I have made, and I know it’s only by the blood of Jesus this weak-hearted woman can be saved.

But Job says (and this is why I think Job’s wife was really all right most of the time – he talks to her like she’s briefly lost her mind, which indicates to me this was outside her ordinary behavior):

But Job replied, “You talk like a foolish woman. Should we accept only good things from the hand of God and never anything bad?” So in all this, Job said nothing wrong. (Job 2:10)

All of this happens in only the first two of forty-two chapters. What does this tell us about the literary work we are about to read? This tells us that the circumstances of Job’s life right now are not the story. They are only the backstory, the catalyst, the setting; the real plot happens in the midst of them. The story is the reckoning that comes after. The story is how these men try to understand what has befallen him. The story is the hearts that are revealed – changed – grown.

Enter: the three antagonists – errr, friends. I mean friends.

When three of Job’s friends heard of the tragedy he had suffered, they got together and traveled from their homes to comfort and console him. (Job 2:11)

I like to think they really had the best intentions. It says so right there – they came to comfort and console him! But wow, did that shot go wide. Made a few of those kind of shots myself, in fact.

But more about wide shots to come.

Talk About Trouble: Chapter 1

I have always been mesmerized by the book of Job. It was the first book of the Bible I ever started trying to read by myself, when I was about 8 and had just gotten my first ever little pink Precious Moments Bible. I picked it, I think, because the name was easy to read. Except I mispronounced it, like every child does the first time, and I’m sure when I told my mother what I was reading she found that endearing. I remember she said to me, “The book of Job can be kind of hard to understand.” Misunderstanding her, I said, “I understand it!” I thought she meant the words were hard to read. But of course, she was speaking theologically. And she was right!

I think that’s why Job has ever since been my favorite book of the Bible, although it’s not something I like to say. It sounds arrogant. It sounds like I’m saying I identify with the main character; that I, too, feel righteous and wronged. Quite the opposite, my dears, quite the opposite. I find Eliphaz the Temanite and Zophar the Naamathite far more relatable. I wish I was more like Job, but he’s absolutely baffling. I’ve returned to the book several times over the years, puzzling over the back-and-forth conversation, trying to understand what was so wrong about what Eliphaz and Zophar had to say. Why were they rebuked? I wondered. Weren’t they defending God’s justice as they had always known it? Aren’t their arguments echoed in other places – in the Psalms, in Kings and Chronicles, in Exodus, in the gospels and epistles? Doesn’t Job himself echo what they have to say? Where is the divergence of their beliefs and the truth?

Job is my favorite book because it is so nuanced, so unflattering to me, so difficult for me to wrap my head around. There is something here – it may not be something easy and it may not be something pleasant, but this little book is important, so I cherish it. In it, I find my errors. There is some mysterious truth in these pages I desperately want to understand. The heart of God is here, and I want it.

So yesterday I started reading Job again. I thought I’d just read a little, maybe a little more each day. No one else was home, a rare quiet moment for me, so I read it out loud. I feel like it hit differently that way. The emotion of the characters began to hum, to jump out of the pages. This is how the book was probably first recorded, orally, and how it is meant to be heard. It is one of those stories older than even the written word itself: some part of it dies on the page, I think, but speaking it revives it. The more I read, the more compelled I was to keep reading, to understand what on earth these people are saying. I read the whole book, 42 chapters. It upended my plans for the day, but I could not let it go. What did they say that God rebuked them? So many of their arguments are voices to my own beliefs, past and present. And God rebukes them:

After the Lord had finished speaking to Job, he said to Eliphaz the Temanite: “I am angry with you and your two friends, for you have not spoken accurately about me, as my servant Job has. So take seven bulls and seven rams and go to my servant Job and offer a burnt offering for yourselves. My servant Job will pray for you, and I will accept his prayer on your behalf. I will not treat you as you deserve, for you have not spoken accurately about me, as my servant Job has.” (Job 42:7-8)

His rebuke seems wholly unconnected to their arguments in my mind. Clearly my mind is wrong. I do not like to be wrong about God; it scares me. So I dig in harder, ask the God who is never wrong to open this mystery to me. Help me, Holy Spirit, to understand things you said to men so much wiser than me!

To understand the end, we go back to the beginning.

The book of Job begins by setting the scene for a complex set of poetical, philosophical soliloquys that compare and contrast the widely held theological beliefs of the time. It asks a “what if” question, the basis of all fine literature: what if Job does not get what he wants? Does his faith, does his righteousness dissipate if he does not get his reward for it? Will the good cease to be good if justice ceases to appear just?

I don’t know a lot about a lot of things in this world, but I know something about stories. I come at everything in this world from that angle because it’s the only one I’ve got: I’m not a theologian, I’m not a historian. I’m not a scientist, an engineer, or a mathematician. I’m a word nerd story lover with an obsessive streak and a keyboard. Sorry if you’re getting tired of it, but it’s what I’ve got. This is something storytellers say in the story-making world that I carry with me into Job: “Plot reveals character.” I’ve probably said it here before. We read, we listen, we absorb stories not because we really care about exactly what happens, but because we care about how the characters will respond to what happens. We care about what it reveals about who they are. The Bible is, in my eyes, the finest piece of literature in existence in this way; it lays out the pattern clearly to show us how God has written, not fiction, but all of nature and history to reveal character – his and ours. Like a pair of good glasses that bring the world back into focus, the Bible sharpens the edges of what has happened in our past to allow us to see our God and ourselves, maybe for the first time, clearly.

Then the Lord asked Satan, “Have you noticed my servant Job? He is the finest man in all the earth. He is blameless—a man of complete integrity. He fears God and stays away from evil.” (Job 1:8)

This is where Job begins: God and the Accuser are discussing who Job really is. God claims there is no one on earth as righteous as Job. The Accuser says, “You get out what you put in, God. He’s only good because you’ve given him good things.”

Satan replied to the Lord, “Yes, but Job has good reason to fear God. You have always put a wall of protection around him and his home and his property. You have made him prosper in everything he does. Look how rich he is! But reach out and take away everything he has, and he will surely curse you to your face!” (Job 1:9-11)

God, being the scientist that he is, allows this hypothesis to be tested. He knows what the result will be. But knowing that others will eventually reach the same upside-down conclusion, ready to demonstrate once and for all the error of the claim, he allows the scientific method to reveal it.

Here is the scientific question: is goodness a result of gratification only, or does it exist independently? Separated from its reward, will Job’s righteousness cease to exist? Why does he do what he does?

What – in short – is Job’s motivation?

The Accuser thinks it is health and wealth, external goodness that manifests by internal goodness – material possessions, comfort, success, honor, ease and plenty – if you would just give us all what we want, Lord, we all would be as good as Job. (Go on, tell me you’ve never heard that argument.) If, then, Job’s actions get him what he wants, only if they get him what he wants, he will continue doing them.

But God thinks there is something more. God thinks there is another reason Job does what he does. God thinks Job’s motivation is anchored in something firmer: conviction in God’s existence and consequent right to do as he chooses, and complete, pure, unshakeable trust in his Master God. Job, simply put, has real faith. Faith not in the circumstantial outcome, but in the character of God.

There is only one way to test this. They must separate the man from the reward. For the sake of clarification, for the sake of revelation, to silence the Accuser and all who would follow in his thinking, for the good of even us who would read it forever after, for a depth of just, perfect reasons beyond these, beyond what our human minds can even hold – God allows Job to be tested.

This is where we first trip.

Is this just? God allows Job to be tested. God allows Jesus to be killed. Who is this terrifying God, and what does it mean to serve him?

Job stood up and tore his robe in grief. Then he shaved his head and fell to the ground to worship.He said,

“I came naked from my mother’s womb,
and I will be naked when I leave.
The Lord gave me what I had,
and the Lord has taken it away.
Praise the name of the Lord!” (Job 1:20-21)

Don’t worry. This is the pinnacle of literature, the story we wait on baited breath to hear. All will be told in due time.

Talk About Trouble: Intro

On this frigid January morning when I arrived to drop my daughter off at school, the staff and volunteers weren’t ready for us. At the designated drop off time, the cones were still on their dollies, the vests were still hung, and no one was there to greet or check in our students. The line of cars wrapped around the parking lot, waiting.

The question loomed in front of us all: what do we do now?

Little do we know how much our responses to the hiccups in our day reveal about our characters. Little do we know how far most of our responses are from God’s hopes.

A boy got out of the car in front of us, one of my daughter’s classmates. He’s twelve. I know because she went to his birthday party a month ago. He had a coat, but no hat or gloves, and the moment he stepped out of the car he already looked cold. He jogged across the parking lot as we all speculated where he was going. Was he going to tell them his mom had to get to work, could they please hurry up? Was he in desperate need of a bathroom?

“He’s probably going to help,” my daughter, who knows him, said.

Sure enough, a moment later, he reappeared in a vest and started helping set up cones. It’s not his job. It’s never been his job. No one else was doing it. No one asked him to do it. No one expected him to do it. He did not come prepared to do it. But he saw others struggling to accomplish the work, for whatever reason, and it was within his power to help – so he helped.

What can we bring to the Lord?
    Should we bring him burnt offerings?
Should we bow before God Most High
    with offerings of yearling calves?
Should we offer him thousands of rams
    and ten thousand rivers of olive oil?
Should we sacrifice our firstborn children
    to pay for our sins?

No, O people, the Lord has told you what is good,
    and this is what he requires of you:
to do what is right, to love mercy,
    and to walk humbly with your God.

Micah 6:8

And it struck me, thunder and all – that’s what Job means. That’s the difference between righteousness and its knockoff, hypocrisy. The difference between the real God and his countless imitations. Righteous men do not stop to think what they can gain by right action; God does not stop to think what reward he will receive for his goodness. He acts good because he is good. Job acted righteously because he was righteous. They need no reward to continue acting the same because it is what they are. The rewards they receive are only joy added to the joy of acting according to their being.

It’s all about motivation. I say it all the time, so I’ll say it again: it’s all about motivation!

What moves me to act the way that I act? What moves God to act the way that he acts? What is our motivation?

That is the question. (Sorry, Hamlet.) The answer to it reveals what is so well buried by our actions, by our accomplishments, by our outward appearances: our hearts. The revelation, purification, and reconciliation of our hearts with God’s heart is his ultimate purpose, the good thing his good heart wants to accomplish because he is good.

So, he allows us to be tested to reveal what we are made of. And one of the clearest ways to reveal our hearts is how we respond to trouble: our own, and that of those around us.

This morning, I saw a twelve year old boy meet God’s hopes for us all: when others struggled with the weight they carried, he did not mock, disdain, or complain about their weakness. He did not wait to find out they had a good reason before he would help. He did not stand in superiority over them and demand they meet some unrealistic, unhuman standard of strength, believing he could do better in their place. He was not entitled to their work or critical of their failure. He did not consider why they were late and whether or not they deserved to suffer the consequences of it. He just zipped up his coat, got out of the car, and helped.

So let’s talk some more about trouble. Let’s talk about Job. Let me talk about what I found.

I Don’t Know

For the account of Thomas, Skeptic turned Believer, read John 20:24-29

“I don’t know, but my big brother knows.”

When I was very little, this was my answer to every question. He was two years older than me, talked nonstop, and, my tiny self was very sure, knew the answer to every question ever posed by mankind. Why bother asking me when you could just ask him?

Sometimes – okay, most of the time – I did know the answer, or at least I was pretty sure I did. Okay I thought I did? But – the moment the question was actually posed – the moment someone turned their eyes on me, quiet little me who so carefully avoided them – in that moment, when my shy little mind went white with panic, I was never sure. Maybe “I don’t know” was a cop out answer. Maybe “I don’t know” was really “I’m afraid to say.” Maybe. I use that qualifying “I might be wrong” word now instead. Maybe.

Maybe that is why my heart uncurls a little when I read about Thomas. Maybe I recognize the voice that said, “I will believe it when I see it,” because I don’t know what to believe. Actually, now that you mention it, now that you ask the question, I am so unsure. I mean, I want to believe it. I want to believe it so badly I am afraid to believe it because it is just too good to be true – and what is it people are always saying: “If it seems too good to be true, it probably is.”

Imagine Thomas’s life with me: the noise. The noise in Jerusalem after Jesus died. The city is bursting, full of tourists who came to celebrate Passover, the biggest event of the year. Bursting with noise. On every street corner, in the alleys, behind every closed door, people are talking about it, and they all have something different to say. “That Jesus man, the one who healed people, they say he tried to overthrow Caesar,” “no, they say he claimed to be the son of God,” “blasphemer,” “usurper,” “killed by the Romans,” “lawbreaker,” “zealot,” “terrorist.” The rumors are ugly – and personal. Thomas had spent years following this man, but he had spent more following the people who murdered him. These people, the ones who killed him, they had spent decades, had dedicated their lives, to this one, holy task: understanding the Scriptures and revealing God’s will to the people. What if – no, really think – what if Thomas had gotten it wrong?

Nothing went the way he expected, the way any of them expected. Jesus was supposed to be their king, their rescuer, their Messiah who saved them from the Romans. They had the heavy weight of their bullies around their necks, and surely Messiah would not want to see God’s people brought low. Surely Messiah wanted what they wanted. Surely Messiah wanted them to be free of their oppressors!

And he did. Oh, he did. He said he did. Didn’t he say he did? He wanted them to be free of the sin that shackled them, free of the worry that distracted them, free of the diseases of their souls. But he didn’t say much about the Romans, except – “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and give to God what is God’s.”

He could calm a storm at sea. He could raise the dead. He could feed thousands of people with one small lunch. And he said, “Let Caesar have his money”?? It did not make sense. He had SO. MUCH. POWER. Why wouldn’t he use it to save them??

And then. And THEN. He did the most unexpected thing of all.

He. DIED.

If any of them had had the kind of power that let Jesus raise people from the dead, we can be sure of one thing: they would have used it to NOT DIE. But Jesus – who had that power – made a different choice. He brought others back from death. But he himself charged right into it. He let himself die. There was no other way to understand it because Thomas had seen his power for himself. He was there. He saw it all. And it didn’t make sense. Why would he let himself die when his people still needed saving?

There’s a moment when our faith tilts on its axis, when our God makes choices we do not expect and do not understand, when we have to stare it in the face and ask ourselves, truthfully, what – or who – is the object of our faith. Do we have faith in God, or do we have faith in the outcome? Do we believe God is a means to achieve our desired end? Or do we believe that God will achieve His desired end, that His will is better than ours, that He will triumph as He has determined? Do we believe He is good, that what He wills is good, even when His will disagrees with our own? Can we lay down our own will, surrender what we’ve always thought would make us happy, and open our hearts to His suggestion instead?

What if His ‘good’ is not like ours?

What if it’s not success. What if it’s not security. What if it’s not even peace. What if He’s willing to pick a fight with Pharaoh, incite the Egyptian army, flee into the wilderness, and pin Himself between His enemies and an uncrossable sea. Do we still believe He’s good?

What if He’s willing to wander around in the wilderness for forty years, with just enough to get by every day and no savings for the future. No home. No retirement plan. Just a promise that it won’t always be this way.

What if the way into His promises is through a river in flood stage. What if the way to His promises is through another army, and another. What if He’s not afraid to pick fight after fight after fight with people who are cruel, dangerous, and in the wrong. What if the only peace He’s interested in is complete, uncompromising lawfulness. People willing to live in harmony and respect.

Or – worse – what if He’s willing to serve the wicked Egyptians for four hundred years. The arrogant Babylonians. The cruel, bloodthirsty Romans. What if He shrugs and says, “Let Caesar have his money. God wants something better.”

What if He’s not interested in what we think we want, after all. What if He’s got something better in mind, something we have not even begun to imagine, and He whispers a ludicrous trust ME, and then does the exact opposite of what we would have done.

Can I still believe, even then?

Could Thomas, who liked to understand? Could Thomas, who had maybe been taught his whole life that God was a means to Israel’s ends? That Israel cried out to God in their captivity, and He saved them! Again, and again, and again. I’m sure, under the yoke of the Romans, they liked to tell those stories best.

His faith was tilting on its axis. He was being given the choice: believe in the God he wanted, the one he’d always believed in, or believe in the God who wanted HIM, the one with His own mind and His own will and His own impossible, God-sized plan. The one who DIED. Dead. Buried. Gone. Along with all Thomas’s hopes and expectations for Israel’s future, for his own future. All. Gone. And maybe he was already feeling like this faith in Jesus was not like the faith he’d been raised in, like quite the fool for having believed any of it in the first place. Maybe he no longer recognized his own faith; maybe there was noise building up, not just outside, but in his own head.

I don’t know where Thomas was when Jesus appeared to the others. It just says he was not there. He didn’t see it. But when he did come back, because he did come back, they told him the most ludicrous story.

He rose from the dead. We saw Him, and He’s alive!

This one moment has tripped many, many millions of people, the same way it tripped Thomas. He rose from the dead? Seriously. Stop and think about it for a moment. What experience in your lifetime would ever give you any reason to believe that? There were a lot of opinions about Jesus in Jerusalem just then, but of all of them, alive was definitely the most absurd.

But here were the people he had trusted most in the world, the people who had seen everything he had and who knew Jesus the way he did, the people he trusted in the noise – and alive was THEIR story. He stayed with them. He watched, he wondered. But he thought to himself the whole time – Are you sure?

And from all sides, all Thomas could hear was noise.

Do you ever feel that way in this world? I do. The more knowledge we have at our fingertips, the noisier it gets. Anyone can say anything and be heard by millions of people. Misinformation spreads faster than any other virus; sometimes deliberately, sometimes ignorantly, but whatever the case, there it goes, covering the earth in a noise pandemic that deafens everyone who hears it. All I can hear, everywhere I go, is noise.

I can no more easily find the truth on the internet than I could find a specific grain of sand on a beach. It’s there, I’m sure of it. But it would take longer than my life to find it.

Thomas could not find the truth in the ridiculous, deafening noise. It was there, somewhere, he was sure of it. But where? It would have taken longer than his life to find it.

So – the Truth found him.

My soul is uncurling to listen.

The Truth found HIM.

“I am the way, the truth, and the life.” Jesus had said that to him, when Thomas had said he did not know the way to the Father.

So there, in the middle of the noise, in the midst of his confusion, the Truth found him.

Jesus stood before a muddled and deafened Thomas, held out his scarred hands, and said, “Touch them, Thomas. Touch them, because that’s what you said you’d need to do to believe.” And yes, Jesus rebuked his doubt. But he also came back just for him. He also came back to silence all the noise.

So when my soul gets muddled and overwhelmed by the noise of the world, when my mind goes white as a sheet with panic and I am not sure of my answer, I will know who I can ask. Find Me, Jesus the Truth.

I don’t know, but my big God knows.

He is the Truth.

And He is Who I choose to believe.

Do You Recognize Me?

Then they cursed him and said, “You are his disciple, but we are disciples of Moses! We know God spoke to Moses, but we don’t even know where this man comes from.”

“Why, that’s very strange!” the man replied. “He healed my eyes, and yet you don’t know where he comes from? We know that God doesn’t listen to sinners, but he is ready to hear those who worship him and do his will. Ever since the world began, no one has been able to open the eyes of someone born blind. If this man were not from God, he couldn’t have done it.”

John 9:28-33, NLT

Have you ever seen an acquaintance in the grocery store, at a child’s game or dance performance, at the playground, or somewhere else you don’t usually see them? You get that feeling, that don’t I know you? feeling, but you just can’t place them. They’re out of context. Usually you see them at church, and here they are at a dance recital. Usually they’re at your child’s school, and here they are at the grocery store. Usually they’re at work, and here they are at the playground. Without their context, they look familiar, but… why? It can be hard to recognize people when the setting changes.

The God of Israel hadn’t spoken anything new to the people of Israel in 400 years. They had meticulous records of all He had said to them throughout history, and they combed them over and over again. They had the Temple, the religious ceremonies, the holidays, the symbolic ways they worshiped Him every day. That was the setting they knew Him in.

But it had been a while since they’d seen Him move among them in the grandiose ways they read about, since they’d heard the authority in His voice, and there were plenty among them who’d decided to step in to fill the void. They’d set themselves high above the people, put on the robes, and claimed to have all the answers, to be the path to holiness, to salvation. They tried to wear His shoes, though they could never really fill them.

The question became: Would God’s people recognize the real Him when He came? Or would they choose the men who had painted themselves as gods among them?

Because when He came, He looked nothing like the people wearing the mask that was supposed to look like Him. He spoke nothing like them. He dressed nothing like them. He acted nothing like them. He valued different things. And He had real POWER – power they did not have. Power to feed thousands with a few loaves and a couple of fish. Power to calm storms and raise the dead. Power to restore sight to the blind. Power to forgive sin.

And here, in John 9, is a man born blind seeing, maybe for the first time, the men behind the masks. How do you not recognize Him?? He could not understand. He had been blind all his life, but he could feel what he could not see: power. He knew who had never been able to heal him (everyone else), and he knew who did. Jesus. Carrying the mark of the God he’d always heard about – real power. Why could they who taught the Scriptures not see the main character standing right in front of them?

Because remember, in their impatience as they waited and waited for their God to speak again, they’d started writing their own Scriptures in His stead. They’d started believing their own words as equal to His. And He broke the promises and rules they’d written with His pen. They didn’t recognize Him – because He didn’t look like them.

But a man who’d never seen their faces was hard to fool with their disguises.

This year, as the year ends and a new one begins three weeks from today, I’m wondering how much of what I’ve believed about God I wrote myself with His pen. What promises have I made for Him? What rules did I add to His? When He comes, when He acts, when He shows real power in my life… can I even see it through the God mask I’ve made to wear over my head?

I want to know exactly where this Jesus man comes from when I encounter Him. Lord… I want to see.

Bethesda, Part Two: Me

If you didn’t yet, you can start here -> Bethesda, Part One: Him

I am the one who said no.

“Do you want to be healed?” – Jesus, John 5:6

A while ago, I started writing down the questions of Jesus out of curiosity. I had read a book about leading by asking good questions rather than by simply making decrees, and I was intrigued. Did Jesus do that? It turns out, he absolutely did. Jesus asked a lot of questions. Most of them were rhetorical. But some – some are just plain bizarre. Like this one – “Do you want to be healed?”

I always thought this question was absurd. The man was lying beside the pool of Bethesda. He had been crippled for thirty-eight YEARS. Of COURSE he wanted to be healed. …Didn’t he?

I got to wondering – why does Jesus bother to ask questions? He already knows our hearts. He proves that time after time as he tells people exactly what they are thinking and then answers their thoughts. So why bother asking?

And then it struck me – he asks us questions because we don’t know.

God sees more clearly into our hearts than even we do. There are times we are just going through the motions, reacting to the hits of the world from our broken foundations, hearts desperately in need of healing, and we don’t even know. We don’t know what’s going on in there that’s making us react this way. But Jesus does.

Do you see how the man sidesteps the question – “I have no one to help me into the pool when the angel stirs the waters”? It’s such a straightforward question. Why wouldn’t he just say yes?

I didn’t understand until God asked me the same question.

For the past few years, I haven’t felt well. I thought maybe I was eating the wrong foods, taking the wrong vitamins, doing something wrong because I woke up nauseous almost every day. My energy was bare minimum; I tried to exercise, to lose weight, to eat well, to take supplements, to diet. Nothing helped. It just kept getting worse.

But my focus could not be on me. My daughters were in the process of being diagnosed with a handful of chronic diseases that required some major lifestyle shifts for us, and I was buried under new diets and medications and appointments and needs. It all came to a breaking point at the end of March, when my youngest spent a weekend in the hospital with asthmatic complications from pneumonia, and the beginning of April, when my gallbladder had had enough.

It turns out it was inflamed. Badly inflamed. I’d been having symptoms of it for at least three years, but by April, it had gotten so bad that I could not eat anything without pain. My doctor got me in quickly, but the surgeon she referred me to could not see me until May, and THEN we would schedule my surgery appointment.

They offered me surgery on July 27^th. I was in pain. I could not eat. My government insurance expired May 31^st, after which I would not be able to afford surgery, even with new insurance. And they wanted me to wait MONTHS to have surgery.

I needed God to step in.

May 7^th, a young man from our church asked if he could pray for me and my husband about the surgery. Of course, we said. Little did I know God had something to say, too. Or, rather, ask.

Do you want me to heal you?

I was so surprised by His clear, steady voice that my reaction was knee-jerk and raw.

Don’t You DARE, I said.

I was mortified. And furious.

He was calm, gentle, steady.

Don’t You DARE do for me what You would not do for my children, I kept going.

I was shocked.

He was not.

Okay, He said.

The next morning, Monday, as I was sitting in my car, in pain, about to try to go into the grocery store and crying out, “God, help!”, I got a phone call. They had a surgery appointment open up on Tuesday morning; did I want it?

Why would You do this for me after what I said to You?

Nothing in my life has ever surprised me like the love God pours out on me when I’m being a brat, when I’m throwing a fit, when I’m refusing help, when I am acting like a kicked beehive of anxiety and fury. In those moments, my absolute ugliest moments – God is kind to me. And it stuns me into silence. It humbles me into repentance. It draws a kind of awe out of me that pours out as worship to this remarkable Being who could love me, even still.

If you had told me before how I was going to respond to God in that moment of prayer, I would have told you you were completely nuts. But God knew there were things going on in my broken, messy heart that needed work, that needed healing, and the first step would be to shake me out of my “I’m fine, everything’s fine” reverie. Maybe the same reverie a man was lying in beside the Pool of Bethesda two thousand years ago. And sometimes, what it takes is a question no one else would think to ask –

Do you want to be healed?

…

<shaky breath> All right, Lord. I’m here. Please heal this hope-sick heart.

Bethesda, Part One: Him

From John 5 – imagine this with me

I lie outside, on the ground by the Pool of Bethesda. It is HOT, and the ground is hard, making me ache anywhere I can feel my body touching it, but I do not move. I barely can, and it is not worth the effort. There is no comfortable way to lie here. At least they built some colonnades for shade.

The sores grow where my body rests on this mat, but I can only shift so much, and there are sores there, too. I am filthy, but no one cares to wash me, and I cannot. What does it matter? No one looks at me anyway. They all know who I am, and they all know I am here. But no one looks. I have been broken now for thirty-eight years; I know exactly how long – or short – human compassion lasts. I know what it looks like when it runs out; charity satisfies its own conscience long before it satisfies real needs. “God will help him,” they say to comfort themselves so they don’t have to anymore. They’re tired of my needs. I can’t even blame them. I am a heavy load to carry.

So now, I am sitting beside the pool of God’s “help.” That’s what they called it, years ago. “There is a pool in Jerusalem by the Sheep’s Gate. Sometimes an angel comes to stir the waters, and if you are the first person into the pool after that, you will be healed!” They dangled the hope of healing in front of my eyes, and like a fool, I reached for it.

Hope deferred makes the heart sick.

This plays on loop in my mind. I’ve heard the proverbs of Solomon my whole life. When people run out of their own wisdom, they grasp for someone else’s, and no one has their own wisdom to help me anymore. They don’t know what to do any more than I do, and I can’t even blame them. Can a human help where God will not?

I have seen the angel stir the waters. I have seen people get healed, people who had others to help them into it. Hope is real – healing is real – just not for me. God may heal broken bodies, but what can he do with my rock hard, sun-baked, cracked clay soul?

My heart is sickened by this pool of hope.

Let the others have it. There are people here at this pool, broken people, who do still have hope, who have people to help them. People who actually want to help, people who haven’t given up or been turned off yet. I pushed all of my people away years ago. Sometimes I am still angry at them for leaving me. Other times – I just can’t even blame them! I am so angry, so hurt, so needy. So cruel. What reason did I give them to stay?

-but-

A man walks up to the pool and looks at me. He must be new here; I hear him asking people about me. I see their furtive looks, I hear them answering his questions politely: coldly, but politely.

The man comes and sits near me. I do not look at him, but he keeps right on looking at me. I feel the filth he must see.

“Do you want to be healed?” He says to me.

What kind of question is that? Do I want to be healed? Why else would I even be here? What, does he think I haven’t tried, that I haven’t done everything everyone else has done, that I haven’t thrown every last hope at this broken body of mine?

…And why has no one ever asked me that before?

Do I want to be healed?

Thirty-eight years is a long time to live broken. It’s a long time to learn how shallow the pool of human compassion is, and it’s a long time to sit beside hope and wonder if it’s even worth trying at all. Hope deferred and deferred and deferred made my heart sick – very sick. I’m not sure it’s worth it to try anymore. No one else cares if I am healed. I’m not even sure I care if I am healed anymore… or if I just want to die and be rid of it all.

I have never said those words to anyone. But when he asks me if I want to be healed, I am so surprised I look him in the eye – and I think he knows.

Pivot!

“I have no one to help me,” I say. “When the water is stirred, someone always gets in before me.”

He doesn’t say anything for a long time. I look up to find him staring at me. He knows I did not answer his question, and so do I. The sorrow there is profound. I wonder if that’s what my eyes look like. Maybe that’s why no one looks at me.

He stands up suddenly. “Get up,” he says, as if to say enough of this. Enough moping. Enough pity. Enough despair. “Pick up your mat and walk.”

I almost laugh at him. But at that moment, life comes back into my dead limbs. I am too astonished to laugh. I move them; I stand up; I pick up my mat;

I walk.

Thirty-eight years I have laid here broken, asking for a miracle. Thirty-eight years, broken, forgotten, alone. Then in one moment. ONE. MOMENT. It took years for my heart to die, and only a moment for it to come roaring back to life.

…but a longing fulfilled is a tree of life.

This man must be from God.

I look up to find him, but I find the Pharisees instead – the Pharisees, who call themselves men of God. Men who refused to help me because they did not want to muddy their hands with “God’s judgment on sin,” which is what they called my brokenness. But here I am, set free by God himself.

“It is the Sabbath; it is illegal to carry your mat.”

Really? Really?? These men know me. They know I have been paralyzed for thirty-eight years – they know I was paralyzed this morning. Do these men not recognize the hand of God when they see it?

“The man who healed me told me to pick up my mat and walk.” Forgive me if I side with him.

I am healed. How are they missing this? God alone can heal!

“Who is this fellow who told you to break the law?”

I AM HEALED –

…And then I realize. I did not even ask the man his name. I am no better than any of them, any of the people who left me alone beside the Pool of Bethesda. I am so wrapped up in myself… that I missed the living pool of compassion deep enough to heal me. I missed the miracle standing in front of me.

I don’t even know my miracle’s name.

I have to find him. And I can. I can find him because I am healed.

I run all over Jerusalem, but I cannot find him. The crowds are too thick. He is nowhere. For the first time in years, I see the temple. The temple of the God who healed me. In a jolt of gratitude, I rush inside it to make an offering for my healing.

He finds me there. It’s like he was waiting for me. He is from God; I should have known I would find them both here.

“You are healed now. Go and stop sinning, or something worse may happen to you.” He knows? He knows… and he healed me anyway.

Now I know who he is. He’s the one they keep talking about, the one the people love and the leaders hate. He is Jesus.

I’m not sure why I did it, why I told the Pharisees. Maybe it was revenge; these men who had gloated over the consequences of my sin were finally being put in their place by this man. Maybe it was fear; I passed the buck to Jesus for the law I had broken, hoping he could handle their ire better than I could. Maybe I thought I could convince them to follow Jesus with my story. Or maybe I just hoped they would like me a little better if I did. But I told them, and they didn’t like me better. They didn’t like him any better, either. I told them he healed me, and it just made them hate him more. How?

It’s funny. I spent thirty-eight years praying for a miracle, and when it finally came… it didn’t do what I expected it to do. It didn’t solve my problems. It didn’t create faith, or draw the praises of God from other’s lips. But it did show me something new about the people around me. It did show me something about myself.

And it showed me everything about God, and the Son He sent.

Because the real miracle wasn’t the healing of my body… it was the man who took the time to look at me. To meet my needs.

The miracle was compassion.

The miracle was Jesus.

It was always Him.

*Proverbs 13:12 – “Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a longing fulfilled is a tree of life.”

To Hezekiah, with Regard

Meditation on the Account of Hezekiah

You knew exactly where he would come from. Your enemy, when he attacked – the king of Assyria. It was no secret; you knew where your weaknesses lie, and you knew he was not merciful enough to ignore them. You were the king, and it was your job to know. You flouted him; you refused to pay him tribute out of confidence in your God, but when his reaction reached you, your confidence shattered. You stripped the Lord’s temple of all its treasures and sent them to him, trying to make amends, trying to earn his mercy. But he has no mercy. He wanted to kill you, and you handed him a reason.

“This is what the great king of Assyria says: What are you trusting in that makes you so confident? …But perhaps you will say to me, ‘We are trusting in the Lord our God!’ But isn’t he the one who was insulted by Hezekiah?” 1 Kings 18:19, 22

You glanced nervously at your exposed resources; the fields of crops growing outside the walls where you could protect them, the people who lived in your enemy’s path, the gates you had to leave open for trade. Guard your resources too closely, and you would suffocate them and have nothing worth protecting. Leave them too exposed, and he would wreck them with glee. You knew where he will come from – through that plain, across that mountain pass, across that river at that ford… the only places that could accommodate his army. And you knew you couldn’t stop him.

“Listen to this message from the great king of Assyria! This is what the king says: Don’t let Hezekiah deceive you. He will never be able to rescue you from my power.” 1 Kings 18:28-29

You just didn’t know when.

I knew exactly where he would come from. My enemy, when he attacked. It was no secret; I knew where my weaknesses lay, and I know he is not merciful enough to ignore them. I flouted him; I openly opposed him out of confidence in my God, and now that his reaction has reached me, I feel the fragility of that confidence. No amount of amends will appease him. He has no mercy. He wants to destroy me, and I handed him a reason.

I glance nervously at my precariously balanced life; the bank account that barely stays in the green, the medical insurance with an expiration date, the time that is always stretched too thin, the chores I can barely keep from swallowing me. Keep going and I wear myself ragged. Stop, and I don’t have my most basic needs met. I knew where he would come from – straight for my health, after my insurance runs out, through my bank account. And I knew I couldn’t stop him.

I just didn’t know when.

So here we are now, you and I, watching the enemy come. Watching bodies armed to the teeth wash through that mountain pass like a rising river, watching the torrent widen out across the plain, watching them come and come and come – as many as we feared, stronger. They are doing exactly what we knew they would do. We just never had a way to stop them.

“The Assyrians took up a position beside the aqueduct that feeds water into the upper pool, near the road leading to the field where cloth is washed.” 1 Kings 18:17

This is a battle to exist, and we cannot win it.

We still have choices: fight and die, or hide and die. Some choices. And just that one other little one… obey. We could inquire of the Lord. We could ask Him to fight for us.

We tremble at the thought. We always meant to spend more time with Him. To bring Him our unflagging gratitude every day for all He’s done for us in the past, to tell our stories from the rooftops of the ways we’ve seen Him move, to come in worship and in prayer with our gifts to His alter. We started to, with the best intentions of continuing. But those fields needed working; those clothes needed folding; the houses needed building; the groceries needed buying; that enemy needed appeasing. After all that, we would come again. But there never was an after. Will He rush to our side when we neglected to rush to His?

We do not deserve His help.

Our shoulders droop. If, by some miracle, He chooses to help us – His help is not easy, and we are not strong. He will ask something of us, something painful, something hard. He will give us instructions that sound mad; He will tell us to walk through the sea, step into the flooding Jordan, march around the city until the walls fall down on their own. Or, worst of all – He might tell us to stay here, to watch the power of our enemy build in front of us while we just… wait. He will ask this of us, and He will require us to obey.

You do not know if you and your people are strong enough to obey.

“Do you think my master sent this message only to you and your master? He wants all the people to hear it, for when we put this city under siege, they will suffer along with you.” 1 Kings 18:27

I am almost certain I am not.

But this is how I see it; one way or another, my strength is going to fail. I am not enough. But I may not have to do this alone. I will go to the Lord. I will beg an audience with Him; I will fall to my knees in front of His throne, and I will bring all the tardy praise I should have brought all those times before, all the tearful stories of His amazing work in my life, all the gifts I thought to give and never did, I will bring it all and I will plead with Him to help us. Whatever His command to me, I will spend whatever is left of my strength on obedience – not on fighting, not on hiding.

“When King Hezekiah heard their report, he tore his clothes and put on burlap and went into the Temple of the Lord.” 1 Kings 19:1

I will obey with all that is left of my strength.

He might say no. I might still die. But I have a better chance with Him than I will ever have on my own.

“And this is what the Lord says about the king of Assyria:

‘His armies will not enter Jerusalem.
    They will not even shoot an arrow at it.
They will not march outside its gates with their shields
    nor build banks of earth against its walls.
The king will return to his own country
    by the same road on which he came.
He will not enter this city,
    says the Lord.
For my own honor and for the sake of my servant David,
    I will defend this city and protect it.’

That night the angel of the Lord went out to the Assyrian camp and killed 185,000 Assyrian soldiers. When the surviving Assyrians^[^e^] woke up the next morning, they found corpses everywhere. Then King Sennacherib of Assyria broke camp and returned to his own land.” 1 Kings 19:32-34

I plead with the Lord, and I hear a voice whisper…

You are not enough… but you are not alone.

Category: Jesus Lover