January: New Beginnings
Day 17 — 17 January
“Thirty-Eight Years at the Edge”
“One man was there who had been an invalid for thirty-eight years. 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?’ The sick man answered him, ‘Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up, and while I am going another steps down before me.’ Jesus said to him, ‘Get up, take up your bed, and walk.’ And at once the man was healed, and he took up his bed and walked.” John 5:5–9 (ESV)
Waiting. Waiting when the first grey light appeared and the other bodies around you shifted in their sleep. Waiting when the midday heat pressed the air out of the colonnade and the shadows shrank to nothing. Waiting when evening fell and another day had passed without anything changing. Waiting when you could no longer remember precisely what it felt like not to wait.
Thirty-eight years. That is not a figure of speech. John records it with the plainness of a census report. Thirty-eight years this man had lain beside the pool at Bethesda, watching other people enter the water, watching other people walk away whole, watching the ripples settle and the surface go still again. Thirty-eight years is long enough to forget that your situation was ever supposed to be temporary. It is long enough for the waiting to stop feeling like a season and start feeling like an identity.
And that is where the trouble begins, if we are honest. Not with the illness itself, but with what happens to a person’s interior world when a temporary problem becomes the permanent furniture of their life. There is a quiet, slow erosion that takes place inside someone who has been stuck for a long time. It does not announce itself. It does not arrive with drama. It simply accumulates, like dust on a windowsill, until one morning you realise you have stopped wiping it away. You have accepted the dust. You have incorporated it into the room. You no longer see it as something that should not be there.
That is why the question Jesus asked this man is the most disruptive sentence in the entire passage. It is not the healing. It is not the command to get up. It is the question that came first, the one that landed before anything else: “Do you want to be healed?”
Think about how strange that sounds. Here is a man who has been lying beside a healing pool for nearly four decades. Of course he wants to be healed. The question seems absurd. Almost insulting. Why would you ask a man who has spent thirty-eight years in that condition whether he actually wants to get well?
Unless the question is not absurd at all. Unless Jesus knew something about long-term waiting that most people discover only from the inside.
The Greek word behind “Do you want” is thelo (θέλω, meaning “to will,” “to want,” “to desire,” “to be resolved upon”). This is not a polite enquiry about preference, like asking someone whether they fancy a cup of tea. Thelo runs deeper than that. It probes the will. It asks whether the person in front of you has the internal resolve, the active desire, the engaged willingness to receive what is about to be offered. Jesus was not questioning whether this man had a wish. Wishes are cheap. Wishes float around like dust in the air. Jesus was questioning whether this man still had a functioning will.
And the man’s answer tells us everything.
He did not say yes. Read it again carefully. Jesus asked, “Do you want to be healed?” and the man replied with an explanation: “Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up, and while I am going another steps down before me.” He answered a question about his desire with a description of his circumstances. He responded to an invitation with a list of obstacles.
That is what thirty-eight years of waiting can do to a human being. It can redirect the will. It can train a person to narrate their limitations instead of naming their longings. Ask someone who has been stuck for a long time what they want, and they will almost always tell you what they cannot have. Not because they are dishonest. Because the wanting has been buried so far beneath the obstacles that they can no longer locate it.
There is an artist’s term for this, and it fits perfectly here. Sculptors speak of pentimento, a word borrowed from Italian (from the verb pentirsi, meaning “to repent” or “to change one’s mind”), used to describe the moment when an earlier image, one the painter covered over, begins to show through the surface of the finished work. What was hidden reasserts itself. What was painted over starts bleeding through the new layer.
Something like pentimento happens in the human heart after long seasons of disappointment. The original desire, the first want, the thing you reached for before you learnt to stop reaching, does not disappear. It gets painted over. Layer after layer of failed attempts, dashed expectations, and reasonable-sounding explanations are applied on top of it until you can no longer see it on the surface. But it is still there. Underneath the explanations, underneath the resignation, underneath the practised speech about why things cannot change, the original longing persists. It has not died. It has been buried.
Jesus’ question was a brush stroke in reverse. He was not adding another layer. He was scraping back to the original surface. Do you want to be healed? Not: do you have a strategy for getting healed? Not: have you identified the right set of circumstances that would permit healing? Not: have you found the right person to assist you? Simply: do you still want this?
That is the most terrifying kind of question, because answering it honestly requires you to admit that you have been living as though you do not.
Now watch what happens next, because the sequence matters enormously.
Jesus does not engage with the man’s explanation. He does not address the logistics of the pool. He does not offer to carry the man to the water. He does not even acknowledge the obstacle the man has described. Instead, He issues a command that bypasses the entire framework the man has been operating within for thirty-eight years: “Get up, take up your bed, and walk.”
The Greek for “get up” is egeire (ἔγειρε, the imperative form of egeiro, meaning “rise,” “get up,” “be roused from inactivity”). It is a present imperative, a command demanding immediate action. There is no transition period in that verb. No “start preparing to stand.” No “begin the process of considering whether you might eventually attempt to rise.” Egeire is now. It is direct. It is the grammatical equivalent of a hand extended toward someone on the ground.
And then something truly remarkable: “and at once the man was healed.” The word eutheos (εὐθέως, meaning “immediately,” “at once,” “straightaway”) collapses thirty-eight years of waiting into a single instant. Whatever had kept this man on the ground for nearly four decades was resolved in a moment. Not gradually. Not through a programme. Immediately.
But here is what I want you to notice, because it matters for how we understand what God is like and how He relates to us. Jesus did not walk past the pool of Bethesda for the first time that day. The pool had been there. The man had been there. And God’s restorative nature, His wholeness, His goodness, His desire for human flourishing, had been present in that place and in that man’s life for every single one of those thirty-eight years. There was never a day when God’s character was absent from the colonnade. There was never a morning when divine goodness failed to fill the air around that pool. God had not been withholding restoration until the right moment arrived. God’s nature does not operate on a schedule.
What had happened, rather, was that the man had constructed an entire system of thought around his inability to access healing. “I have no one to put me in. Someone else always gets there first.” These were not lies. They were accurate descriptions of his experience. But they had become something more dangerous than mere observations. They had become the architecture of his inner world. They had replaced desire with narration. They had substituted longing with logistics. And over thirty-eight years, that architecture had become so solid, so familiar, so much a part of who this man understood himself to be, that it functioned as a wall between him and the wholeness that had been available all along.
Jesus’ question cracked the wall. His command opened the door.
The man did not need a new pool. He did not need a faster route to the water. He did not need a more helpful companion. He needed someone to ask him whether, underneath all the explanations, he still wanted what he had originally come for. And then he needed the courage to respond, not with another description of his obstacles, but with his body. He needed to get up.
There is a Hebrew word that captures what this man experienced on the other side of obedience: shalom (שָׁלוֹם, meaning “peace,” “wholeness,” “completeness,” “nothing broken, nothing missing”). Shalom is one of the richest words in the Hebrew language. It describes far more than the absence of conflict. It speaks of a state where everything that should be present is present, where nothing is fractured, where a person is functioning as they were designed to function. When the man at Bethesda picked up his mat and walked, he stepped into shalom. Not because shalom had just been created for him. But because the barriers, both physical and internal, between him and the wholeness that had always been within reach were finally removed.
Thelo and shalom. Will and wholeness. The Greek question and the Hebrew destination. Jesus asked whether the man’s will was still engaged. When it was, even faintly, even imperfectly, even mixed with years of resignation and excuse, the wholeness that had never been absent became the man’s lived experience.
Perhaps you recognise yourself somewhere in this story. Not necessarily in the physical ailment, but in the architecture. Perhaps you, too, have built a structure of explanations around the thing you stopped hoping for. Perhaps you have narrated your obstacles so fluently and for so long that you have forgotten there is a desire underneath them. Perhaps somebody could ask you today, “What do you actually want?” and you would answer with a list of reasons why it cannot happen.
If so, hear the question beneath the question. Jesus was not asking the man to produce a strategy. He was asking whether the original longing was still alive. And the breathtaking implication of His command, “Get up,” is that the longing does not need to be strong. It does not need to be confident. It does not need to have a plan attached to it. It simply needs to exist. It simply needs to say, even if the voice trembles: yes. I still want this.
Thirty-eight years at the edge of the water, and the new beginning did not come from the pool. It came from a question, honestly received, and a command, immediately obeyed. The wholeness had never relocated. The man’s willingness had been buried. When it surfaced, even for a moment, everything changed.
Not because God had finally decided to act. But because a man who had forgotten how to want remembered. And the goodness that had been present all along became the ground he walked on.
Declaration
Now I name what has been buried. Underneath the explanations, underneath the rehearsed reasons, underneath the architecture I built to house my disappointment, the original longing is still breathing. It has not died. It was only covered. And today I am honest enough to say: yes, I still want this. I still want wholeness. I still want to walk freely into the life I was designed for. I refuse to answer the question of desire with a description of obstacles. I refuse to let thirty-eight years, or thirty-eight days, or thirty-eight minutes of waiting rewrite what I know to be true: that the goodness of God has not relocated, that His restorative nature has not thinned, that shalom has been present in every room I have occupied, including the ones where I stopped believing it. I am getting up. Not because I have a strategy. Not because someone has finally carried me to the right place. But because the will that was buried has surfaced, and the wholeness that was always available is meeting me where I stand. The mat I lay on becomes the mat I carry. The place of my waiting becomes the proof of my walking. And the One whose character does not shift has not begun a new work in me today. He has simply met the moment when I stopped explaining and started moving.
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