Healing the "Want-To"
Tuesday of the Fourth Week of Lent
Daily Reading: John 5:1 – 16
Focus Passage:
One who was there had been an invalid for thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him lying there and learned that he had been in this condition for a long time, he asked him, "Do you want to get well?"
"Sir," the invalid replied, "I have no one to help me into the pool when the water is stirred. While I am trying to get in, someone else goes down ahead of me." (Jn. 5:5 – 7)
The challenges of being healthy of body, mind, emotion and soul sometimes outweigh the difficulties inherent in sickness and disability.
Spiritual health does not happen by osmosis. It is not a matter of joining the right church or being a regular attender in worship or having parents who live with a growing faith. Spiritual health, like physical or mental health, happens with intentionality. We make decisions about how we intend to live, about the kind of persons we want to be.
In the spiritual life, the transforming work belongs to God and not to us; however, we have to act on the desire to be more and more consciously connected to God. We have to open ourselves to God’s shaping work within us. We don’t stumble upon it accidentally.
Jesus encounters this man who had been in ill-health for 38 years. “Do you want to get well?” Jesus asked. He asked the question of the man’s physical health. He also may have been asking about the man’s spiritual well-being or his emotional health.
Well-being begins with desire, with a growing awareness of the hunger that resides in the inner caverns of our lives. This yearning is the stretching of our soul towards God. This inner hunger is a sign of my human emptiness and my need for God. Before I can be “well,” I have to “want to” be well.
For many of us, the point of healing in the story is not in the actual physical healing, but in healing our “want to.” Healing, while it comes from God, also invites us to diligence and sacrifice. We are invited to lay aside the ways we have seen ourselves and the lies we have believed about ourselves in order to come into a new way of relating to God, self, others, and the world.
This new way of relating is often very painful, as it stretches us to the bounds of what we thought was possible, as it pushes us to the edges of ourselves, as it invites us to explore who we are in God, and as we see more clearly the truth that resides at our core.
Today, we pray that God would heal our “want-to” . . . and that having our “want-to” healed, we would step more intentionally into physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual wholeness.
For Reflection:
Transformational life-change is difficult for a number of reasons. One reason we resist adjusting our lives is because our current state of life has become so familiar. We tend to “normalize” that which we experience for an extended period of time; thus, even pain, disease, and unhealth can become so familiar that we don’t know who we would be without them.
This Lent, have you discovered anything within you that stands in the way of your healing or wholeness? If you have, then perhaps this is a good time to check-in with your “want-to.”
Daily Reading: John 5:1 – 16
Focus Passage:
One who was there had been an invalid for thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him lying there and learned that he had been in this condition for a long time, he asked him, "Do you want to get well?"
"Sir," the invalid replied, "I have no one to help me into the pool when the water is stirred. While I am trying to get in, someone else goes down ahead of me." (Jn. 5:5 – 7)
The challenges of being healthy of body, mind, emotion and soul sometimes outweigh the difficulties inherent in sickness and disability.
Spiritual health does not happen by osmosis. It is not a matter of joining the right church or being a regular attender in worship or having parents who live with a growing faith. Spiritual health, like physical or mental health, happens with intentionality. We make decisions about how we intend to live, about the kind of persons we want to be.
In the spiritual life, the transforming work belongs to God and not to us; however, we have to act on the desire to be more and more consciously connected to God. We have to open ourselves to God’s shaping work within us. We don’t stumble upon it accidentally.
Jesus encounters this man who had been in ill-health for 38 years. “Do you want to get well?” Jesus asked. He asked the question of the man’s physical health. He also may have been asking about the man’s spiritual well-being or his emotional health.
Well-being begins with desire, with a growing awareness of the hunger that resides in the inner caverns of our lives. This yearning is the stretching of our soul towards God. This inner hunger is a sign of my human emptiness and my need for God. Before I can be “well,” I have to “want to” be well.
For many of us, the point of healing in the story is not in the actual physical healing, but in healing our “want to.” Healing, while it comes from God, also invites us to diligence and sacrifice. We are invited to lay aside the ways we have seen ourselves and the lies we have believed about ourselves in order to come into a new way of relating to God, self, others, and the world.
This new way of relating is often very painful, as it stretches us to the bounds of what we thought was possible, as it pushes us to the edges of ourselves, as it invites us to explore who we are in God, and as we see more clearly the truth that resides at our core.
Today, we pray that God would heal our “want-to” . . . and that having our “want-to” healed, we would step more intentionally into physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual wholeness.
For Reflection:
Transformational life-change is difficult for a number of reasons. One reason we resist adjusting our lives is because our current state of life has become so familiar. We tend to “normalize” that which we experience for an extended period of time; thus, even pain, disease, and unhealth can become so familiar that we don’t know who we would be without them.
This Lent, have you discovered anything within you that stands in the way of your healing or wholeness? If you have, then perhaps this is a good time to check-in with your “want-to.”
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