Today’s passage is Mark 5:35-43. Just after the bleeding woman confessed her story to Jesus when she’d been healed by touching his cloak, a messenger from Jairus’s house says that Jairus’s daughter is dead. Jesus tells him not be afraid, just believe. At Jairus’s house Jesus says the girl is sleeping, not dead, and he puts the mourners out. Then with the girl’s parents and Peter, James and John, Jesus goes to the girl’s room and tells her to get up. When she does, Jesus says to tell no one.
#65279;
What do you think is dead in your life?
Do you see with fear or with faith?
Today a student I’d expelled and then allowed to return to the school a year ago, came up to me with news.
He said he wanted me to be the first to know that he’d been accepted by a famous Swiss hotel management school.
I nearly cried. I’d been so sure a year ago that this student was dead to hope.
Now he was alive.
When I had to face the reality of my first wife’s alcoholism after fifteen years of denial, I wanted to die of shame.
Instead of sympathy for others who’d been victims of her alcoholism, I thought only of myself and blushed at having been a fool in the eyes of so many others who knew.
#65279;
Instead of sudden understanding and love for my long-suffering wife, I thought only of myself and how she’d damaged my precious career in the past.
Instead of wanting to face myself with courage, I wanted to run away in fear, which I did.
I ran away from the dying life of my wife to adultery with a woman very much alive who wanted a baby.
What I wouldn’t see was that in the dead body of a broken marriage with a broken, alcoholic, there was the hope of life if I could only have believed.
But I didn’t believe.
I panicked at the shell of a marriage I had created but didn’t want to accept.
I had no faith but couldn’t see it.
My next relationship went from initial ecstasy to hell in little more than a year.
The Lord let me take myself down to nothing, to the empty man I truly was with no money, no job and no prospects and only a stubborn belief that God existed at the bottom of my despair.
That was all the faith I had in the utter ruin of my life. God was there.
There was nothing else. Just God.
I understand that bleeding woman and that despairing father because I am them.
Everything had to be shattered by fear, broken into hopelessness before I saw God.
#65279;
And even now, there are moments when fear rises up and blots out my Lord. That’s why QT is so important. That’s where I meet God even when I fear.
Application: pray for my hurting brothers in Christ
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Lord, let me remember my fear and your hand that held me from destruction till my eyes could see. Hold me now and in the week ahead.
