“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.” (John 5:2-9 NIV)
Anyone who can be in a landscape of joy while maintaining immunity to it hasn’t come to the end of himself. He hasn’t experienced how good the good news really is. He should see that someone else’s victory over hopelessness is our own victory, because Christ has brought the same liberation to every single one of us willing to say yes, to stand, and to walk. Once we’ve been to the end of ourselves and the beginning of Christ, we share our victories together, and parties break out at unpredictable moments.
-- Kyle Idleman in “The End of Me: Where Real Life in the Upside-Down Ways of Jesus Begins”
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