Special Note
To my soul sisters,
I wrote this devotional with you in my heart. I couldn’t read this story without thinking of the courageous women I know who are actively fighting for hope and joy amidst their suffering. I am proud of you for having hope. I am proud of you for having courage. I am proud of you for continuously trying to find Jesus admits the crowd of your own pain. I see your life as a blessing.
I love you,
A
Scripture For The Week
Mark 5:24-34
So Jesus went with him. A large crowd followed and pressed around him. And a woman was there who had been subject to bleeding for twelve years. She had suffered a great deal under the care of many doctors and had spent all she had, yet instead of getting better, she grew worse. When she heard about Jesus, she came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak, because she thought, “If I touch his clothes, I will be healed.” Immediately her bleeding stopped and she felt in her body that she was freed from her suffering.
At once Jesus realized that power had gone out from him. He turned around in the crowd and asked, “Who touched my clothes?”
“You see the people crowding against you,” his disciples answered, “and yet you can ask, ‘Who touched me?’ “
But Jesus kept looking around to see who had done it. Then the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came and fell at his feet and, trembling with fear, told him the whole truth. He said to her, “Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be freed from your suffering.”
Devotional
No one plans for their life to fall apart.
When we are small children in school and our teachers ask our innocent hearts what we want to be when we grow up, no one says “I plan on experiencing trauma, on losing the very me I know myself to be, and living in pain”.
In our ordinary lives, we get to live in a beautiful illusion that we are capable of providing and caring for ourselves. Of course, being good Christians, we know that God is the source of our provision, but we usually don’t actually have to rely on Him to be.
We get the extraordinary blessing from God to carry about a “normal life”. We are given the opportunity to pursue the Lord while walking in a way similar to the world around us.
What we fail to take into account is that our ability to pursue God in-line with the pace of the world is actually a blessing - not a norm.
Before my car accident, I thought I had an understanding of how deeply God cares for us in our lives. I thought I had lived through enough hard events to know how to rely on him. What I never thought, was that one day, in the flash of trauma, I would realize how wrong I had been about my own understanding.
My accident didn’t drive me to grief by fear and pain alone. I was used to being afraid. I was used to living in trial. I was used to understanding that God was the only thing left.
What I wasn’t used to was suddenly needing God more than I ever had before, while simultaneously feeling more disconnected then I ever had.
I lost the me I thought I was, and was left with a stranger. A stranger who didn’t know how to connect with God. A stranger who was hurt, lonely, scared and confronted with the weight of their own sin.
It was only after my accident, that I realized how much we take the blessing of our day to day lives for granted.
I realized that it’s a blessing to live a normal, mundane life. It was a blessing to get up, work for 8 hours, go home exhausted and do it all over again the next day. It was a blessing to participate in simple joys like hiking, coffee dates with friends and attending church services.
Every single part of our lives is an immense blessing from God.
I know it doesn’t feel that way when you realize you hate your job, when your roommate is driving you insane, when your spouse seems to have forgotten how to clean the dishes again and when you feel lost in the life you have.
I know life doesn’t feel like a blessing when you leave school, enter “the real world” and realize how incredibly mundane it can be.
In the story of A Dead Girl and a Sick Woman in Mark 5, Jesus is on his way to see a synagogue ruler's dying daughter when a woman reaches out and touches His clothing in search of healing. Jesus immediately notices power leaving His being and, despite the fact that he’s in a large crowd, searches for the person who touched him. When he finds the woman, He blesses her for her faith.
When I read this story in Mark, I saw a kindred spirit. I saw a woman suffering from years of pain. I saw a woman who had seen every doctor in the book, building up debt in her search for healing, and was still going home each evening in pain.
I saw a woman, so much like the women in my life, who I know are suffering from ailing health right now.
I read this story and I saw the thousands of people affected by Chronic conditions every single day. I felt the heartbreak of realizing that you have to walk a different path than those around you. I felt the impact of trying to go at the same pace as everyone else, while knowing that getting dressed that morning took all the energy you had. I relived the dismay of going to endless doctors for help, only to be told that you’re helpless - and going home to an unplayable bill to remind you of how lost you are.
But most of all. I saw the hope.
I saw the hope of a woman who dared to believe while living with a chronic condition for twelve years.
I saw the courage of a woman, who despite continually growing worse, continued fighting for healing.
I saw the immense faith that she had to disregard the doctors, to believe she was still savable, and reach out and touch Jesus’ cloak.
Jesus was in a large crowd when the woman reached out to touch him. Endless people had already bumped into him, even his disciples thought it was crazy that Jesus wanted to know who had touched him.
The difference between the women with the chronic condition and everyone else was that she intentionally reached for Jesus. She reached out with intentional faith that He would heal her.
In one act of courageous faith, Jesus told her to walk free from her suffering.
The lesson from this story is that no matter where we are at in our lives, we have a place next to God if we have intentional faith.
God sent his Son to give us hope for a future more beautiful than we can yet understand. We have hope for beauty in the mundane. We have hope for healing in the suffering. We have hope of being set free.
All we have to do is reach out.
Thoughts For The Week
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Where in your life do you need to set aside your misconceptions, have hope in God’s saving grace, and in immense faith, reach out to touch Jesus’ cloak?
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How would you feel set free from your trial’s without the trial itself going away?
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Write down at least three things that have been a blessing in your life today. Start to notice the endless tiny ways God works in our lives to show us love and hope.
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Prayer
Heavenly Father,
We thank you for the blessing that you have seen fit to put into our lives. We thank you for the endless opportunities to learn, grow, and walk towards you in this world.
We thank you that no matter what comes our way in this life, that we can see You and your love for us as a blessing.
Let us remember that you care about us amidst our pain and suffering. Let us remember that even your Son cared for the woman with a chronic condition.
You save us Lord when everyone else has deemed us unsavable.
May our eyes be taken away from the illusion of this world telling us that we are trapped, and be drawn to the glorious image of your Son setting us free from our suffering.
Send your Holy Spirit, that we may reach out and touch your healing embrace.
In your Son’s name we pray,
Amen
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