I was reading in The Art of Spiritual Listening, by Alice Fryling, and in Chapter 8, Listening for God’s Transforming Power, she had us read John 5:1-15. It told about the encounter Jesus had at the pool of Bethesda where people who were disabled lay hoping to be the first into the pool when the waters were disturbed so they could be healed. There he met a man who had been an invalid for 38 years. Fryling writes…The people at the pool were not dressed in their Sunday best. The man Jesus talked to was not reading the Bible or having his quiet time. Jesus intersected this man’s life when he was needy, smelly, and helpless. He was stuck in his way of life and in his view of life. He wasn’t even praying. She goes on to ask in the exercise, Why do you think Jesus asked the man, “Do you want to get well?” (John 5:6) when the answer seems obvious?

I thought about that question before I answered for myself. The man was so used to his circumstances and the reality of his body unable to walk. How would he be able to see reality any other way? He was stuck. How could he not be…his whole experiences of life held him in that reality. In The Chosen they depicted this very episode. They showed the invalid unable to look away from the pool even as Jesus was talking with him. He thought the pool would heal him, all evidence to the contrary. Maybe that’s why Jesus had to ask him, “Do you want to get well?”

I have to ask myself, as I struggle some days in my “stuckness” of seeing the world as it is now, what do I want? I want to believe. When Jesus told the man to get up and take his mat and walk, that man had to take that first effort. He did! When the Jewish leaders were infuriated that he picked up his mat on the Sabbath, they, too, were just as stuck in their view of the world that had nothing to do with God. The question remains for each one of us whether we realize it or not. “Do you want to get well?” This world is filled with people stuck in the belief that nothing can ever change the reality of our world. Do we want it to change? Will it change with us doing the same things over and over and over again? Jesus physically changed that man that day. Do you want Jesus to change you? Think about it. I want to believe that’s possible at a deeper level that brings me right to God standing before me. He’s here. Always.