DARE TO HOPE
“Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but when the desire comes, it is a tree of life”
Musings about a man who stayed at a pool for 38 years.
He had been there so long that he was renamed; ‘The man at the pool’. Or could that have been the name his parents gave him the day he was born? Funny how people tend to associate us with our problems, and gradually our given names tend to fade into oblivion, and we are now addressed by the problem/ situation/ circumstance or place we are in.
Ever wonder how the man would have felt to be stuck at the pool for 38 years? Not moving forward, not moving backwards. Just staying there, waiting there for the stirring of the water. The water did stir, because we were told that “… an angel went down at a certain time into the pool and stirred up the water; then whoever stepped in first, after the stirring of the water, was made well of whatever disease he had “.Yet this man couldn’t get in. He was paralyzed, impotent, couldn’t even help himself, he had no one who could help him into the pool when it stirred, because healing could only be for the person who got into the pool first. Would he ever come first?
I wonder why he still remained there, because during those 38 years of waiting, he would have witnessed different people getting healed of their diseases, uncountable miracles of healings. Yet he stayed there. There may have even been a time during those 38 years that he could have been the only one around when the Angel stirred the water. Yet he couldn’t get in, he just couldn’t help himself, and he had no man to help him. “…I have no man to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up…” he said. Why did he then remain there, why didn’t he just leave? But could he really leave? If he could, where would he go, who would take him in?
Nevertheless, he stayed there, could it be that he dared to believe? That He dared to hope?
But one day, “… Jesus saw him lying there, and knew that he already had been in that condition a long time…”. Jesus, The Helper of the Helpless, stepped into the man’s situation, and He turned the story of that man around. The man didn’t need to get into the pool anymore to receive his healing, all he needed to do now, was to pick up his bed and walk! And he did; Hallelujah!
- He did not need any man after all
- He did not need to be first
- He received his healing divinely, not via the pool
- The years spent no longer mattered
- His name was definitely changed.
In that time, Jesus had to go to where the man was to be able to see him; today, Jesus is waiting for you to invite him in. Why don’t you?
