“Do you want to be healed?”
Healing is scary because you don’t quite know the version of yourself waiting on the other side.
You don’t know how much God will ask of you. You don’t know what the freedom could feel like after you’ve lived inside fear for so long. And if I’m being honest, sometimes I even worry, what if I’m not good at healing?
What if the healing is slow, full of setbacks, preventative appointments, and data to analyze? What if it’s imperfect, non-linear progress? What if I have to keep choosing it every single day? From experience, that’s about how it goes. And it sounds so hard.
Scripture tells us that God goes before us. He did it for the Israelites before they ever stepped into the Promised Land, He was already there, preparing a way into freedom, preparing a place they could not yet see.
I’ve been thinking a lot about that lately because I was brought to the story of the man at the pools of Bethesda. I’ve read that passage so many times, but somehow this one detail stopped me in my tracks. Thirty-eight years.
Thirty-eight years of waiting. Thirty-eight years of disappointment. Thirty-eight years of believing healing belonged to someone else or was at the mercy of others. If you’ve seen the scene in The Chosen, he is pitiful.
Then Jesus walks up to him and asks what seems like the strangest question in all of Scripture: “Do you want to be healed?”
At first, it feels like an obvious question. Of course he does. But, Jesus wasn’t asking about his legs.
He was asking if the man was willing to leave behind the identity he had carried for nearly four decades. Jesus was inviting him to step away from the only life he had ever known. To trust Someone instead of the pool. To believe that healing would be worth the uncertainty waiting on the other side. Healing has a way of changing you, and if you’re like me, change can be terrifying.
Today marks nine years since the car accident that forever divided my life into “before” and “after.” Every June 30th feels like another invitation to answer Jesus’ question again: Do you want to be healed?
Not just from grief, but from fear. Or from trauma. Or, if you really know me, you know that I really need healing from is always expecting the worst. Not just emotionally, but physically too.
For over a year, I’ve intentionally pursued health and strength. And now, just when I thought I had found some momentum, my back and my knee have reminded me that healing is rarely a straight line. Some days just feel so defeating… that I’ll never be “well” and that the accident forever “took” that from me. Those old companions of fear and worry and “what if?” have tried to find their way back in.
It is so easy to sit beside my own pool of Bethesda, staring at my limitations instead of looking at Jesus. But the beautiful thing about His question is that my “yes” doesn’t carry the burden of making myself well. His desire to heal me is greater than my ability to heal myself. And He has seen me through this before. I have no reason not to believe in Him.
The guarantee isn’t that the journey will be easy. The guarantee is that God is good. He is a God of victory, of order, and of mercy. He goes before me, preparing places I cannot yet imagine, asking only that I keep following Him.
So today, on this anniversary, I say yes again. Yes to hard healing over easy pain. Yes to trusting the God who has never left me. Yes to a God who wants me to feel better. Yes to believing that even when progress feels slow, He is still at work.
Lord, lift me out of the dead and lonely places in my life and in my mind. Give me the strength to stand when I want to stay beside the pool. Help me trust what You have promised more than what I presently see. And let Your desire to heal me be enough for my yes.
