And Jesus, perceiving in himself that power had gone out from him, immediately turned about in the crowd and said, “Who touched my garments?”
And he looked around to see who had done it.
But the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came in fear and trembling and fell down before him and told him the whole truth.
And he said to her, “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease.” Mark 5: 30, 32-34
…the whole experience of compline is in some way a touching of the hem of Christ’s garment: something has been given, something disclosed. And the person holding a candle at compline may hear a call, and make a journey, as another stressed woman once did, from touching the hem of Christ’s garment to meeting him face to face.
… just occasionally, it opens into deeper things, on to more ultimate questions. Just occasionally, there is an opening of heart and soul, which in some sense the liturgy itself has made possible; and then it is that, just sometimes, someone takes a few more steps on that journey from the hem of his garment to the light of his countenance. ~Malcolm Guite from Poet’s Corner
Most of us are like that desperate woman hoping for healing by reaching out to touch the hem of His robe – ashamed to be so needy, hoping to go unnoticed, not actually wanting to bother anyone, but still helpless – so very helpless, but not without hope.
He knows when we reach out in desperation; He feels it.
So He lifts us up as we begin our journey to His light – from a touch of His hem to seeing His face.
It starts with reaching out. It starts with taking a few more steps. It starts with hope in the Light.
Before the ending of the day, Creator of the world, we pray That with Thy wonted favour Thou Wouldst be our guard and keeper now.
From all ill dreams defend our eyes, From nightly fears and fantasies; Tread under foot our ghostly foe That no pollution we may know.
O Father, that we ask be done Through Jesus Christ, thine only Son, Who with the Holy Ghost and Thee Dost live and reign eternally.
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…by Easter Tuesday, we often find ourselves back in the shadows.
The cancer is still there. That financial struggle is not resolved. The depression returns. That relationship is still broken. We might ask, “If Christ is risen, why does the world still feel so broken?” This is not a lack of faith; it’s the honest lament of believers who are learning to walk in the tension of the now and the notyet.
This sacred tension calls us to rejoice and weep on Easter Tuesday.
Rejoice that Jesus is risen. We have a living hope. We are promised an eternal inheritance, which is being kept for us by the one who purchased it with his own life. But embrace the grief too. Sadness is the healing emotion of the soul. Sorrow is a gift from God that allows our souls to breathe and cope in a world that aches, longing for restoration. ~Brian Croft from “Embracing a Sacred Tension”
For you are not a God who delights in wickedness; evil may not dwell with you. 5 The boastful shall not stand before your eyes; you hate all evildoers. 6 You destroy those who speak lies; the Lord abhors the bloodthirsty and deceitful man. Psalm 5: 4-6
To invite Jesus to cleanse the temple of our hearts is not to ask for guilt and shame. It is to ask for healing. The same Lord who overturned tables did so not to destroy and humiliate, but to reclaim and restore. He interrupts only that which obstructs. He removes only that which hinders life and worship. His cleansing is never punitive; it is always redemptive. ~Scott Sauls from “What Would Jesus Overturn in Your Life?”
To live coram Deo is to live one’s entire life in the presence of God, under the authority of God, to the glory of God. To live in the presence of God is to understand that whatever we are doing and wherever we are doing it, we are acting under the gaze of God.
There is no place so remote that we can escape His penetrating gaze. To live all of life coram Deo is to live a life of integrity. It is a life of wholeness that finds its unity and coherency in the majesty of God.
Our lives are to be living sacrifices, oblations offered in a spirit of adoration and gratitude.
A fragmented life is a life of disintegration. It is marked by inconsistency, disharmony, confusion, conflict, contradiction, and chaos. Coram Deo … before the face of God. …a life that is open before God. …a life in which all that is done is done as to the Lord. …a life lived by principle, not expediency; by humility before God, not defiance. ~R.C. Sproulfrom “What Does “coram Deo” mean?”
On this Easter Tuesday, we cannot escape His gaze… all of us, all colors, shapes and size, even the leadership of our nation. We are created in His image, imago dei, so He looks at us as His reflections in the mirror of this troubled world.
What we do, how we speak and write, how we treat others – reflects the face of God.
Jesus is the embodied temple who brought His sacrifice to the people, rather than people coming to the temple with their sacrifices.
I cringe to think how hard we try to hide from His gaze.
Yet some don’t make a pretense of hiding – they make it quite public: our elected leader chooses Easter to publish a vile message filled with profanity, name-calling and threats, then gives a fragmented and disintegrated Easter speech, to celebrating families with children, with inconsistency, dishonesty, disharmony, confusion,conflict, contradiction, and chaos.
We drown together in the mud of our mutual guilt and lack of humility. All that we do to others, we do to God Himself.
We must be on our knees asking for cleansing, for the temples of our hearts to be overturned, our corruption scattered, our sorrows lifted.
Jesus comes to cleanse, repair, reclaim and restore – His mission to save us from ourselves.
Kind of takes one’s breath away.
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Being thorough, I remove a holey sock to view a diabetic man’s filthy feet. I use the time to complete our talk of what drove him to live on the street as I wonder how any of this can help.
While he tells me more of his medical past, I run warm water into a stainless bowl. I immerse both his feet and begin to ask myself what good it does for this poor soul to allow himself to undergo this ablution.
Silently I sluice the water between his toes and soap the crusty callous at his heel. I marvel at his arch and notice how closely it fits my palm. I know he can feel this proximity too. He shuts his eyes.
Months of useless layers peel away, revealing layers useless weeks ago. Removing the tough brown hide of yesterday yields clean pink skin, but we both know this ritual will be useless days from now.
Still, this moment may withstand time’s test, teaching us each lessons unknown before. I learn the medicine of selflessness. He learns what medicine is really for– the hope that basin, soap and touch can bear. ~Robert Fawcett “Washing Feet”
Jesus washing the feet of his disciples by Finnish artist Albert Gustaf Edelfelt
What e’er the soul has felt or suffered long, Oh, heart! this one thing should not be forgot: Christ washed the feet of Judas. ~George Marion McClellan from “The Feet of Judas” in The Book of American Negro Poetry 1922
Ford Maddox Brown — Washing Peter’s Feet
As an aide in a rest home caring for the crippled feet of the elderly, as a medical student in an inner city hospital seeing the homeless whose socks had to be peeled off carefully to avoid pulling off gangrenous toes, as a doctor working with the down and out detox patients from the streets who had no access to soap and water for weeks,
I’ve washed feet as part of my job.
People always protest, just as Peter did when Jesus started to wash his feet. We never believe our feet, those homely gnarled bunioned claw-toed calloused parts of us, deserve that attention, and certainly not love.
We are ashamed to have someone care about them, care for them, when we don’t care enough on our own.
I have never washed the feet of someone about to betray me, leading me to my death.
I have never had my feet washed by someone who understood my heart needed cleansing even more than my feet, who loved me that much.
Until now.
This one thing should not be forgot: Kneeling, He wears the humility and towels of a servant as His only raiments. He gently cups our heels in His palms, washes and dries our soles and arches and toes, but our hearts are held, still beating, in His loving hands.
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Then will the eyes of the blind be opened and the ears of the deaf unstopped. Then will the lame leap like a deer, and the mute tongue shout for joy. Isaiah 35:5-6
Scripture documents Jesus’ healing miracles for those of us who were not there to witness them – a touch of saliva to eyes and tongue, fingers placed in ears, words that give new life to paralyzed limbs.
As a physician who has worked with many tools in healing over forty years, I do know the power of spoken words, or the comforting touch, but never used saliva and mud.
There is nothing I can do with those simple means to reverse the irreversible. Of course many medical “miracles” happen every day in the 21st century, but the spit and words of the 1st century are far more miraculous because of from Whom they came.
These ancient miracles took place when a willing heart met Mercy head on. No surgery required, no expensive medications, no magnetic imaging, no robotic procedures. In comparison to the skills of the ultimate Physician, I’m humbled in my obvious limitations. I myself was a blind, deaf, dumb and lame healer, immobilized until I underwent a modern heart-opening procedure myself. Not just a cardiac intervention to dilate my coronary arteries, but the knowledge that my spiritual heart has been opened wide.
Grateful, I become unstoppable, as I too now leap and shout for joy.
Some time later, Jesus went up to Jerusalem for one of the Jewish festivals.Now there is in Jerusalem near the Sheep Gate a pool, which in Aramaic is called Bethesda and which is surrounded by five covered colonnades.Here a great number of disabled people used to lie—the blind, the lame, the paralyzed.One who was there had been an invalid for thirty-eight years.When Jesus saw him lying there and learned that he had been in this condition for a long time, he asked him, “Do you want to get well?”
“Sir,” the invalid replied, “I have no one to help me into the pool when the water is stirred. While I am trying to get in, someone else goes down ahead of me.”Then Jesus said to him, “Get up! Pick up your mat and walk.” At once the man was cured; he picked up his mat and walked.
The day on which this took place was a Sabbath,and so the Jewish leaders said to the man who had been healed, “It is the Sabbath; the law forbids you to carry your mat.” But he replied, “The man who made me well said to me, ‘Pick up your mat and walk.’ ”
So they asked him, “Who is this fellow who told you to pick it up and walk?” The man who was healed had no idea who it was, for Jesus had slipped away into the crowd that was there.
Later Jesus found him at the temple and said to him, “See, you are well again. Stop sinning or something worse may happen to you.”The man went away and told the Jewish leaders that it was Jesus who had made him well.
So, because Jesus was doing these things on the Sabbath, the Jewish leaders began to persecute him.In his defense Jesus said to them, “My Father is always at his work to this very day, and I too am working.”For this reason they tried all the more to kill him; not only was he breaking the Sabbath, but he was even calling God his own Father, making himself equal with God. John 5: 1-18
I am overcome by ordinary contentment. What hurt me so terribly all my life until this moment? How I love the small, swiftly beating heart of the bird singing in the great maples; its bright, unequivocal eye. ~Jane Kenyon from “Having it out with Melancholy”
Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend With thee; but, sir, so what I plead is just. Why do sinners’ ways prosper? and why must Disappointment all I endeavour end?
…birds build—but not I build; no, but strain, Time’s eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes. Mine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain. ~Gerard Manley Hopkins from “Thou art indeed just, Lord”
It seems so obvious: someone lying on a mat near a healing pool for 38 years – an Old Testament reference to Israel’s wilderness journey and inability to enter the promised land – wants to get well.
Jesus knows this man’s heart is troubled.
Yet Jesus asks this paralyzed man whether he wants to be healed. Not if he is ready to be healed, but whether he wants to be well. It doesn’t seem like a hard question to answer, but at times in our own lives, we too may not feel ready for a transformation to wholeness?
Maybe we really aren’t sure what “well” and being healed will mean to our lives. We wander in the wilderness of weak, struggling bodies and minds, hoping and praying to be led into a promised land of no illness or limitations. But often we aren’t sure. We only know there are many compelling reasons – no help, no hope, isolation from family and friends – to explain why we are stuck where we are.
We can’t imagine it being any other way.
Some are born with disabilities determining what they can and can’t do, knowing no other existence than to be dependent on others for help and care. Others develop illness or experience injury that changes everything for them, creating overwhelming needs leading to profound discouragement.
Some try anything and everything, proven or unproven, to find relief from their symptoms, to find their way out of their wilderness — sometimes with lasting results, often with no improvement.
Jesus is asking this man and asking us: are you ready to live a full life that takes you beyond your current limits? If so, we are transformed from who we have been, to someone we and others may no longer recognize.
It is a scary prospect to pick up our mat, carry our own baggage and walk. But when Jesus enters our life and asks us, point blank, if we want to get well, to become whole, to leave our wilderness behind and join Him – we should not hesitate – wasting precious time explaining all the reasons it hasn’t worked so far.
Jesus is ready, willing and able. And we will be transformed.
…our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. Romans 8:18
I am reading slowly through the words in the Book of John over the next year. Once a week, I will invite you to “come and see” what those words might mean as we explore His promises together.
This year’s Barnstorming Lenten theme is Ephesians 3:9: …to bring to light for everyone what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God, who created all things…
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After the two days he left for Galilee. (Now Jesus himself had pointed out that a prophet has no honor in his own country.)When he arrived in Galilee, the Galileans welcomed him. They had seen all that he had done in Jerusalem at the Passover Festival, for they also had been there.
Once more he visited Cana in Galilee, where he had turned the water into wine. And there was a certain royal official whose son lay sick at Capernaum. When this man heard that Jesus had arrived in Galilee from Judea, he went to him and begged him to come and heal his son, who was close to death.
“Unless you people see signs and wonders,” Jesus told him, “you will never believe.”
The royal official said, “Sir, come down before my child dies.”
“Go,” Jesus replied, “your son will live.”
The man took Jesus at his word and departed.While he was still on the way, his servants met him with the news that his boy was living.When he inquired as to the time when his son got better, they said to him, “Yesterday, at one in the afternoon, the fever left him.”
Then the father realized that this was the exact time at which Jesus had said to him, “Your son will live.” So he and his whole household believed.
This was the second sign Jesus performed after coming from Judea to Galilee. John 4: 43-54
Faith is to believe what you do not see; the reward of this faith is to see what you believe. Hebrews 11:1
Does the road wind up-hill all the way? Yes, to the very end.
Will the day’s journey take the whole long day? From morn to night, my friend.
But is there for the night a resting-place? A roof for when the slow dark hours begin.
May not the darkness hide it from my face? You cannot miss that inn.
Shall I meet other wayfarers at night? Those who have gone before.
Then must I knock, or call when just in sight? They will not keep you standing at that door.
Shall I find comfort, travel-sore and weak? Of labour you shall find the sum.
Will there be beds for me and all who seek? Yea, beds for all who come. ~Christina Rossetti “Up-Hill”
This life of ours can be an arduous and often troubled journey.
We might feel like we are never able to reach a point of rest in our uphill climb through obstacles and hazards. It can be so dark we’re not sure we can see the road, much less where we’re headed.
When a royal official makes the 20 hour journey uphill to find Jesus to ask him to heal and save his son, he surely was at a point of desperate need. He is so convinced by the stories of Jesus’ power to heal, he would go wherever needed to make that happen for his dying son.
Yet he discovers Jesus’ power is not just in His hands, but in His words.
Our faith is not just based on what we see with our eyes, but in our trust and belief in Jesus, who is the Word.
When we are faced with that up-hill journey through troubled times, we will not be left stranded, lost and waiting by the roadside. Many have gone on before us, and those faithful are ready and waiting to help walk alongside us and give us encouragement to keep going.
There is a place waiting for wayfarers like us.
Jesus speaks the healing of the son and the royal official takes Him at His Word.
No longer is that official merely politically powerful; he descends back down the road to his home spreading the word to all around him about the far greater power of Jesus.
There is salvation through the Word to those who believe. We all are weary travelers welcomed with open arms as the uphill road points us to the best home of all.
I am reading slowly through the words in the Book of John over the next year. Once a week, I will invite you to “come and see” what those words might mean as we explore His promises together.
Lyrics by Lori McKenna:
When the road under your feet is dark and feels wrong And you find yourself lost and all your confidence gone And the stars over your head through the clouds won’t be revealed I’ll walk with you, even if it’s uphill
When the weight of your troubles send your knees into the dirt And all your loyal distractions only magnify the hurt When lonesome doesn’t quite define how so alone you feel I’ll walk with you, even if it’s uphill
Hard times and landslides are part of life I know Like they say, none of us get out alive Whatever ocean you’re swimming across However valley low Whatever mountains you climb I’ll walk with you, even if it’s uphill
Blessed are the times filled with sun, surrounded by your friends Those days when all the new roads wait right where the old roads end And should you wake up to Everest right outside your windowsill I’ll walk with you even if it’s uphill
Hard times and landslides are part of life God knows We all got some mountains to climb Whatever ocean you’re swimming across However valley low I’m right here, I’ve been right here all this time And I’ll walk with you, even if it’s uphill I’ll walk with you, even if it’s uphill
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Some people see scars, and it is wounding they remember. To me they are proof of the fact that there is healing. ~ Linda Hoganfrom Solar Storms
Wet stones from the middle path. A shard of green heartwood ripped by the big storm from the oak’s broken, heavy limb. And we all have scar stories.
Which say more than wound stories. Wound stories tell how we were injured. Scar stories tell how we heal. ~Liza Hyatt,”What I Carry Home With Me” from Wayfaring
between the rosebuds and the thorns the pine tree branches with their needles and kitty claws
my hands are always bleeding
and turning up scars that cry, “I’m alive, I feel it. I feel it all” and then falling back into whispers while my body heals itself one more time ~Juniper Klatt, I was raised in a house of water
…see how the flesh grows back across a wound, with a great vehemence, more strong than the simple, untested surface before.
There’s a name for it on horses, when it comes back darker and raised: proud flesh, as all flesh is proud of its wounds, wears them as honors given out after battle, small triumphs pinned to the chest –
And when two people have loved each other, see how it is like a scar between their bodies, stronger, darker, and proud; how the black cord makes of them a single fabric that nothing can tear or mend. ~Jane Hirshfield from “For What Binds Us”
I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape — the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn’t show. ~Andrew Wyeth, artist
photo by Nate Gibson
In winter, we are stripped naked as the bare trees right now; our skin and bones reveal the scars, broken branches, and healed fractures of previous winter windstorms. We no longer have anything to hide behind or among, as our defects are plain to see.
Our whole story is a mystery untold, impossible to conceal.
Scars come in various sizes and shapes, some hidden, some quite obvious to all. How they are inflicted also varies–some accidental, others therapeutic, and too many intentional.
The most insidious are the ones so internal, no one can see or know they are there. Sometimes we aren’t aware of them ourselves – only something unreachable is still hurting at times.
Most often, they are simply the scars of living in a hazardous world – on farm animals, healing into a tough scar of leathery “proud flesh”.
Yet, none of them are as deep and wide as scars accepted on our behalf, nor as wondrous as the Love that oozed from them, nor as amazing as the Grace that abounds to this day because of the promise they represent. These are scars from the Word made Flesh, a proud flesh that won’t give way, lasting forever.
Though I am abundantly flawed with pocks and scars, I am reminded each winter of my renewal. There are hints of new growth to come when the frost abates and the sap thaws.
Indeed, I am prepared to wait an eternity, if necessary, to understand the rest of the story.
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Knowing God without knowing our own wretchedness makes for pride. Knowing our own wretchedness without knowing God makes for despair. Knowing Jesus Christ strikes the balance because he shows us both God and our own wretchedness. ~Blaise Pascalfrom Pensées
We yearn for perfection, to be flawless and faultless, unblemished, aiming for symmetry, remaining straight and smooth.
Life serves up something far different and our eye searches for what is broken like us: to find the cracks, scratches and damage, whether it is in a master’s still life portrait replete with crawling flying insects and broken blossoms, or in the not so still life of what is around us.
Somehow Christ bridges Himself between God and us, becoming a walkway for the wretched.
In the beginning we were created unblemished, image bearers of perfection.
No longer.
We bear witness to brokenness with our shattered lives, fragile minds and weakening bodies. It is our leaks and warts that stand out now.
To restore our lost relationship with Him, Christ strikes the balance and bridges the gap; He hung broken to mend us, to lift and carry us over the chasm, binding us to Him forever.
There comes the strangest moment in your life, when everything you thought before breaks free— what you relied upon, as ground-rule and as rite looks upside down from how it used to be.
Your heart’s in retrograde. You simply have no choice. Things people told you turn out to be true. You have to hold that body, hear that voice. You’d have sworn no one knew you more than you.
This disease of being “busy” (and let’s call it what it is, the dis-ease of being busy, when we are never at ease) is spiritually destructive to our health and wellbeing.
It saps our ability to be fully present with those we love the most in our families, and keeps us from forming the kind of community that we all so desperately crave.
Tell me you remember you are still a human being, not just a human doing. Tell me you’re more than just a machine, checking off items from your to-do list. Have that conversation, that glance, that touch. Be a healing conversation, one filled with grace and presence.
Put your hand on my arm, look me in the eye, and connect with me for one second. Tell me something about your heart, and awaken my heart. Help me remember that I too am a full and complete human being… ~Omid Safi from The Disease of Being Busy
It has been nearly three years since I hung up my stethoscope. I’m no longer paid to be very busy. It isn’t feeling strange to wake up with no “job” to go to.
I still am vigorously treading water but with no destination in mind other than to stay afloat. It’s enough to just move and breathe in this new and strangely unfamiliar territory.
It was scary at first, backing off from all-consuming clinic responsibilities, yet knowing I was becoming less effective due to my diminishing passion and energy for the work. I’d been working in some capacity for over fifty years, starting in high school.
I could barely remember who I was before I became a physician.
So here I am — changed and changing — volunteering here and there, budding and blooming in new colors and shapes, exercising a different part of my brain, and simply praying I make good use of the time left to me, being something as worthwhile as what I had been doing.
So, once again, my days have become… strangely beautiful… in ways I could never have imagined.
AI image created for this post
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