A 12-Year Wait

Twelve years is a long time. For the sick woman in today’s Gospel reading, it’s the amount of time she waited to be healed. Mark tells us that the woman was so desperate for healing she suffered under many doctors but instead of getting better, she got worse. You would think that all those years of waiting would make her give up and decide, "It’s always going to be this way, so why bother?" But this woman had one last resort; she had heard about Jesus. “If I only touch His cloak, I will be healed,” she says to herself (Matt. 9:21). And so, as the people push around Jesus, this woman edges through the crowd and touches His robe. Immediately, she feels in her body that she has been healed! Jesus says to her, “Take heart, daughter, your faith has healed you” (Matt. 9:22).

There is so much to learn from this woman’s story. One of the lessons I see is that God is at work in the background even when He's silent. When this woman became sick twelve years before, Jesus hadn’t even started His earthly ministry, and yet God’s plan all along was for her to meet Jesus and be healed. (Oh, and have her story told in three of the four gospels to be read for 2,000+ years!) It’s encouraging to remember that while we wait for His healing, whether it’s physical, financial, mental, or emotional, God is working out a wonderful plan for that healing to take place. Each step of the journey is filled with its own teachable moments. If this woman had been healed by the first doctor she went to, she may never have met Jesus and had her life completely transformed—both now and for eternity.

Waiting for God to act is not easy. I have things in my own life that I have prayed about off and on for over 15 years. He still hasn’t answered with a miraculous yes, and frankly I don’t know whether He ever will this side of Heaven. Sometimes we are asked to do the hard work of waiting because in the waiting we are changed. As we, too, wait for our prayers to be answered, let’s ask God to give us courage in the waiting and the faith of this woman who touched the hem of His robe.

Lenten reading from Mark 5:24-34

Photo from https://pixabay.com/photos/marguerite-shrub-marguerite-flower-1509438/