While You Were Looking For The Miracle

I write this final newsletter of the month with the same sentiment that moved me to write about Joseph and Job.

If you have journeyed with me through those series, you will remember what happened there. We took stories we thought we knew, stories worn smooth by generations of retelling, and we dared to look again. Each time we did, something underneath the familiar surface began to breathe.

The same process took place in me as I sat with this passage. It is one of the most widely used and shared stories in all the scriptures. I have read it countless times. I have heard it preached more times than I can remember. Then one day, as I sat with it quietly inside an airplane ride back home, something shifted.

I suddenly realized that our lustful pursuit of the spectacular on the outside had blinded us. It had blinded me too. We had all been so captivated by the miracle we could see that we missed the pearl of wisdom and insight this passage was offering us for the practical understanding of our own journeys.

The spectacular dazzles the eye. The truth feeds the soul. They are rarely found in the same place.

So come with me one more time. Let us look again.

There is a story in Mark chapter five that most of us think we know. A woman who has been bleeding for twelve years pushes through a crowd and touches the hem of Yeshuas' garment. She is healed in an instant. It is a beautiful story. It has been preached thousands of times. Almost every time the spotlight lands on her.

This time I want to invite you to look somewhere else.

Standing right there in the crowd that day was a man named Jairus. He was a leader of the synagogue in that region. A man of position. A man of religious standing. A man whose entire life had been built on the tradition, the structure, and the certainty of his faith. On this day none of that could help him. His little girl was dying.

So this man of order and rank did something remarkable. He fell to his knees in the dust in front of everyone and begged. Desperation has a way of stripping us of our titles.

Yeshua agreed to go with him. Every step mattered. Every minute counted.

Then, in the middle of this race against death, Yeshua stopped.

A woman had touched Him. Not grabbed Him. Not called out to Him. She had simply brushed the edge of His robe with her finger. In a very loud Middle Eastern crowd that was pushing and jostling Him from every side, He felt it. He stopped everything to find her, to see her, and to restore her.

Now put yourself in Jairus' sandals for a moment. Your daughter is dying. The healer has finally agreed to come. Every delay feels like a betrayal. I imagine everything inside him was screaming for Yeshua to keep moving.

Here is where I believe we have been reading this story with our eyes half open.

What if the stop was not a delay at all. What if the stop was the preparation?

Jairus watched a woman he would have known very well. As the leader of the synagogue, he would have been familiar with her and her condition. Twelve years is a long time in a small community. He would have prayed for her many times. He would have probably sent her to see physicians, perhaps even as far as Jerusalem. He knew better than anyone that her condition was beyond any human ability to change or cure.

Now here was this same woman, with no status, no appointment, and no right to be there, receiving in a single touch what twelve years of physicians could not give her. He watched faith work in real time. He saw it with his own eyes. Moments later, when the messengers arrived with the words no parent should ever hear, your daughter is dead, Yeshua turned to Jairus and said something He could only say to a man who had just witnessed what Jairus witnessed.

Don't listen to them. Just trust me.

Notice something here that is easy to miss. The scripture tells us Yeshua overheard what the messengers said to Jairus. Think about that for a moment. This was a raucous Middle Eastern crowd, pushing and jostling from every side, voices screaming from all directions. There is no way Yeshua would have seen or heard that exchange from the middle of all that noise unless He was aware of Jairus the whole time.

While He was stopping for the woman, while He was speaking with her, while the crowd pressed in around Him, He never lost sight of the man whose daughter was dying. He was fully present to the moment in front of Him without ever abandoning the one who was waiting on Him.

This is how God holds us. We think the delay means we have been forgotten. 

Yet, the truth is we were never out of His awareness for a single second.

The woman's healing was real. Her story matters, yet I believe that moment on the road was also for Jairus. Faith was being built in him for a future he did not yet know he would need.

What looked like an interruption was actually an installation.

I believe is worth mentioning here the fact that this is what happens when we read the scriptures with more than our analytical mind.

You see, the literal reading of this story gives us a sequence of events. A request, an interruption, a healing, a death, and a resurrection. The literal reading is accurate but it is also incomplete. Truth in the scriptures, like in life, rarely lives on the surface. It lives underneath, in the movements of the heart, in what is being formed in people while events are happening for them.

When we approach the scriptures and our lives literally, we get information. When we approach them with an open heart, we get transformation. These are not the same thing.

One fills the mind. The other one changes the life.

Therefore consider that if you are living through what appears to be an interruption it may actually not be an interruption at all. The delay that frustrates you may be the very thing revealing you for what is coming. Remember that God is the God of the moment and He is never in a hurry nor does he waste a stop along the way.

I want to be honest with you about something else this story reveals.

Some of you have written to me over the months telling me that what I share here sometimes sits uncomfortably. It steps outside the safety lines of what has been widely accepted. I understand that discomfort. I have felt it myself many times on my own journey.

Yet, here is what I have come to also see.

Tradition is passed down by human hands that are generally trying their best. So this is not a flaw in the design. It is simply the reality of it. Now with this in mind we need to consider that humans carry things. Like wounds we have not tended, fears we have not faced, and control we have not surrendered to name a few. So when people pass down truth without doing their own inner work, the truth often arrives clouded and mixed with the unhealed parts of the ones who carried it.

Over generations, additions get mistaken for the original. Fences built by frightened men get treated as the words of God Himself. This is what happens when God becomes something we do instead of Someone we seek to experience and know personally.

The religious leaders of Yeshua's day were not evil men. Most of them were sincere. They had simply inherited a version of God filtered through generations of human fear and human control, and they defended the filter as if it were the treasure. Jairus was one of them. It took the sickness of his daughter to bring him past the filter and into an encounter with the truth.

So let me ask you the question this story has been asking me.

Where in your life are you reading literally what God is asking you to see spiritually?

Where have you mistaken the interruption for the enemy when it may be the installation?

Where have you accepted an inherited version of God without ever pressing through the crowd to touch Him for yourself?

The woman in the story did not wait for permission. She did not go through the proper channels. She reached out from her desperation and touched something real. Jairus, the man who represented all the proper channels, also ended up on his knees doing exactly the same thing.

In the end both of them found that God is not an idea to be defended. 

He is a Presence to be encountered.

So when the voices come, and they will come, telling you it is too late, it is too far gone, why bother anymore, remember what Yeshua said to a father standing in the ruins of his hope.

Don't listen to them. Just trust Me.

PS See you next Sunday