I Forgot This Is Not Normal

"And on a scale of one to ten, where would you say the pain is today?"

She looks up. The woman behind the desk has a pen ready and a form with a little row of numbers printed on it, and she is waiting, kindly, the way people wait when the question is routine.

"Oh. None, really."

The pen does not move. "None."

"No, I mean. Not pain pain."

And that is where it happens, in a small room with a radiator ticking and a poster about hand washing on the wall. Because as she says it she is sitting with her weight rolled onto her left hip, the way she always sits now. She has not slept on her right side since a Sunday in a garden four years ago. She takes something at eleven in the morning without thinking about it, the way you would take a sip of water. She stopped carrying the shopping in one trip so long ago that her son does it and neither of them has ever mentioned why.

None, really.

She is not lying. This is the thing that has to be said plainly, because a person in her position will hear an accusation in the air where there is not one. She is not being brave, or stoic, or spiritual, or difficult. Her body simply moved the line. Pain that arrives once is an event. Pain that arrives every single day for four years is not an event, it is weather, and after a while nobody reports the weather. It just becomes the country you live in.

So she says none, and she means it, and she leaves, and the little row of numbers stays blank.

And you know how she got there, because you took the same road. You have your Sunday in a garden. Your line has moved too. Somewhere in the last few years you quietly stopped counting, and now if somebody asks how you are, the honest answer and the easy answer are the same word, and it is fine.

I want to ask you a different question. It is not mine.

He asked, and the asking was the mercy

There is a man in John's account lying beside a pool in Jerusalem, one of a crowd of people waiting there for something to change. The text does something small and unusual before Jesus says a word.

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?John 5:6

Thirty eight years, the account says. And the first thing out of Christ's mouth is not a command and not a comfort. It is a question, and on the face of it a strange one. Of course he wants to be healed. He is lying by a pool of people who all want to be healed. Why ask?

Because thirty eight years teaches a man not to want.

That is the injury nobody treats. Wanting hurts. Every time you let yourself hope for the shoulder or the back or the head to be different, and it is not different, something small in you learns to stop putting its hand up. So you stop asking. Then you stop mentioning. Then you stop counting. And by the end you can sit in front of a form with a row of numbers on it and honestly write nothing, because the part of you that would have written a seven went quiet years ago to protect you.

Jesus walks up to a man in exactly that condition, and the first thing He does is restart the wanting.

Notice, too, what He does not do. He does not ask how long the man has believed, or how he ended up there, or what he has tried. He does not tell him he is there because of something he got wrong. There is not one syllable of blame in the whole scene, and if there had been, John would have written it down, because John writes down everything, including things that make his own friends look slow. That is one of the quiet reasons I trust these accounts. They keep the details that a story invented to impress you would have tidied away.

So here is what I am putting in front of you, and I want to be careful, because I am not going to sell you anything.

I am not promising you an outcome. I will not do that to you. I do not know what tomorrow does with your body, and anyone who tells you they do is selling something. And nothing here goes anywhere near your care. Keep the appointment. Keep taking what your doctor has given you. God has put real help into human hands, and using it is not a smaller kind of faith, it is the same faith with its sleeves rolled up.

What I am saying is much smaller and much more disruptive. God still heals bodies. Now, in this century, in ordinary houses, in people with jobs and washing machines and no theology to speak of. That is not a historical claim about something He used to do. And He is not only interested in the dramatic ones. He is interested in yours. Yours specifically, the one you stopped mentioning, the one with a date on it.

And He is asking you the question He asked at the pool. Not to test you. To give you back the thing the years took, which is the right to want.

So let yourself want it. Out loud. Today.