“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, Jesus asked him, ‘Do you want to get well?’” (John 5:5-6 NIV)
Who wouldn’t want help? Someone in denial of reality.
I imagine after so many years, the man at the pool no longer has a healthy idea of what life could be if he stood and moved about town and took ownership of his life. Time did its thing, but so did environment. He spent every day and every night surrounded by hurting people. The world was compressed to the bounds of those five colonnades that defined the pool at Bethesda. He wasn’t around too many healthy people, so unhealthy had become his new normal.
I watched a documentary about a thirty-four-year-old woman who had a three-hundred-pound tumor removed from her body. The tumor itself was twice the size of her initial body weight. It was a very horrific thing to see, needless to say. As the filmmakers documented this surgery, it was clear that they wondered why she had waited until the tumor was the size it was. All she could really say was that she didn’t get help because she figured it would go away on its own.
The tumor was unique, but the attitude was not. We figure that our finances will sort themselves out it time. But the credit card debt keeps piling up, and still we keep spending. The tumor is growing.
We figure our teenage daughter will change her behavior and get with the program. Meanwhile, she’s starting to cut herself. She’s beginning to fall in with a very unhealthy group of kids, and she’s moving further away from God by the day, but we decide to be patient. The tumor is growing.
We figure the problems in our marriage will fade away on their own if we don’t address them. Who says we need help? Just ordinary husband-and-wife-stuff, and it is nobody else’s business. And within a few months, we’re sleeping in separate rooms and he’s feeling an attraction to someone at work. The tumor is growing.
Jesus asks, “Do you want to get well?” Why not ask for help?
-- Kyle Idleman in “The End of Me: Where Real Life in the Upside-Down Ways of Jesus Begins”
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