The Healing I Think I Imagined

Six years ago something changed and she has never told anybody why she thinks it did.

She will tell you it changed. That is not the hidden part. Anybody who has known her for a decade knows what she used to be like and can see that she is not like that now, and she is entirely open about the fact of it.

It is the account she has never given.

Because there was a Tuesday. It was not a meeting and it was not a service; it was an ordinary Tuesday, and something happened in a kitchen, and about two weeks later she noticed that the thing she had had for eleven years was not doing what it had always done.

And in six years she has assembled a really excellent set of explanations.

The timing of a change in medication, which is genuinely plausible and which her doctor also thinks is plausible. The season of life. The fact that she had been sleeping better. The well-documented tendency of long conditions to have long remissions.

Every one of those might be right. She would want me to say that and I am saying it, and I am not a doctor and neither is anybody who writes anything on the internet, and nothing here is telling anybody anything about their medical care.

But here is the thing she never once said, in six years, to anybody.

She does not actually believe any of them.

She has built a whole account she does not believe, and she has told it perhaps thirty times, and she has never told the other one once.

So let me ask you.

What changed in you that you have never once said out loud?

He stopped a moving crowd to make room for one sentence

There is a woman in a crowd who has had something for twelve years and has spent everything she had on it, and she gets what she came for without anybody noticing.

That is the part everybody remembers. She touches His cloak, and something happens, and she starts to move away.

And then the strangest thing in the passage happens. He stops.

There is a dying child at the other end of this journey and a father standing right there in an agony of urgency, and Jesus stops a moving crowd and asks who touched Him, and the disciples tell Him it is a ridiculous question in a crush like that.

And He keeps looking.

Then the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came and fell at His feet and, trembling with fear, told Him the whole truth.Mark 5:33

Notice what it costs her to stand there, because the text does not hide it. You are allowed to tell the whole truth rather than the tidy one, and the Spirit has never once required an account to be neat before receiving it.

Now, why?

She had already received. Nothing was added to her body by that conversation. He could have let her go and she would have gone home with exactly what she came for and He would have lost nothing.

He stopped the whole crowd so that she would have to say it out loud.

And look at how it is described. Trembling with fear. This was not an easy moment for her and Scripture does not pretend it was. She had done something that in her situation was not permitted, in a crowd, and now the whole thing was going to be public.

She told Him the whole truth. Not a summary. Not an acceptable version.

Hear where you stand.

You are not a woman with an embarrassing theory about her own body. Scripture has Jesus halt a crowd on the way to a dying child in order to give one woman the chance to say out loud what had happened, and the Spirit has never needed a person's account to be tidy before He would receive it.

And I want to be very careful here, in exactly the way this house is always careful, and then I want to be direct.

Careful: nothing here tells you what happened in your body and nothing here touches your medical care. Keep your appointments. Take what you are prescribed. Nobody writing an article can examine anybody, and any voice that tells you otherwise is not a safe voice.

Direct: you have spent six years giving an account you do not believe, and that is its own kind of exhaustion, and it has nothing to do with medicine.

You are allowed to hold two things. You are allowed to say the doctors think it was the medication, and I think something else happened on a Tuesday, and I do not know how those two fit together.

That is not superstition. That is honesty about an uncertainty, and the word says she told Him the whole truth, and the whole truth is not the same as the tidy one.

And you are not an unreliable witness to your own life. Mark 5 has Jesus halt a moving crowd so that one woman could say out loud what had happened to her, and the Spirit He poured out has not once needed an account to be tidy before He would receive it.