Living Water at a Broken Well
I have a post over at my church's resource page today. Here's the beginning, click through at the bottom for the entirety.
A week before my birthday my husband prayed it would not be like the last two. In 2015, I witnessed the violent shooting of a police officer. In 2016, my husband was gone on a trip that didn’t go as planned—a terrible disappointment—and I celebrated by making myself banana pancakes and sharing them with my dog. It was a sad, rainy and lonely day. In 2017, I was supposed to be camping with a few close friends, but instead I spent the day moving from my bed to the bathroom, losing yet another little life inside me, our third miscarriage in three years.
A birthday is simply a marker, an anniversary of sorts, a stake in the ground: I have been alive for 37 years and am now in my 38th year. But when that marker is marked doubly by sadness, tragedy or pain on an ongoing basis, it creates inward stasis. Moving forward seems impossible, so staying in place seems the way of safety. There comes a paralyzing fear of feeling anything in regard to pain; instead, it seems better to become stoic and indifferent to it. We know life holds suffering and God is sovereign over it, but when the suffering comes in waves and leaves no corner of our hearts and lives untouched, it can be tempting to find the deepest corner and bed ourselves there permanently, praying we can bear it. The Bible is not silent on this stasis, though, nor does it offer demands too insurmountable for the broken. The Word of God and the gospel offer living water even to those waiting by broken wells.
On the morning after my birthday this year, my husband read John 5:2-9 to me, the narrative of another person in his 38th year, another man who was waiting for wholeness too, while he watched others receive what he desired:
Now there is in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate a pool, in Aramaic called Bethesda, which has five roofed colonnades. In these lay a multitude of invalids—blind, lame, and paralyzed. One man was there who had been an invalid for thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him lying there and knew that he had already been there a long time, he said to him, “Do you want to be healed?” The sick man answered him, “Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up, and while I am going another steps down before me.” Jesus said to him, “Get up, take up your bed, and walk.” And at once the man was healed, and he took up his bed and walked.
Over the past month, I have been asking the Lord to show me the way out of my insufficient corner and into the way of trusting God with all my emotions, frailty, paralyzation and sorrow. He has been using this passage as a roadmap of sorts, and I am grateful for it. This passage is descriptive and not prescriptive—meaning it tells us what happened then, but not necessarily how it should always happen. But it does show us a common malady in the hearts of men and the posture of our Savior.
