Do you want to get well?

 From my reading this  morning in “The Rest of God: Restoring Your Soul by Restoring Sabbath" by Mark Buchanan. 

“No wonder Jesus once asked a man he meant to heal, “Do you want to get well?” (John 5:6). 

Maybe the man didn’t, strange as it sounds. Maybe his sickness had become his haven, his lover, his overlord. And no wonder Jesus was so responsive to any old beggar or leper or blind man who threw caution to the wind and outright begged for healing.

Not everyone wants to get well.

It’s the most natural thing to befriend your sickness, even, after long association, to depend upon it. Imagine any of the people Jesus heals. Their entire lives—their physical lives, for sure, but also their emotional and intellectual and relational lives—all have taken shape around their injuries or diseases. That man at the well. 

Thirty-eight years of life without options. Thirty-eight years of life without obligations. He carries burdens, yes, but one he’s never carried is the weight of others’ expectations.

For thirty-eight years.

And then Jesus shows up one day and changes all that. One word from Jesus, and all thirty-eight years fall behind the man, vanish in a blink, and a future he stopped daring to imagine stands vivid and solid before him. He can do all the things he never could and ever wanted to do. He can do them here and now—for Jesus’s miracle joins healing and therapy in one terse command. Muscles spongy from years of idleness suddenly grow taut and supple. Bones spindly from never bearing the body’s full weight turn instantly thick and sturdy. Balance all topsy-turvy from chronic proneness immediately calibrates for walking, running, dancing, leaping.

Do you want to get well?

Restoration shocks the system. It alters not just our health—it alters our world. All that we establish to placate or indulge or accommodate our sickness disintegrates with those stark words, “Take up your mat, and go.”

Do I want to get well? That’s a question I’ve wrestled with on sabbatical. If I believe I’m to go back restored, in what ways am I sick now? And how have I grown content with that?

I try to control too much, is one. I know how this happened— there was a season when the church seemed to require it. There was a time it seemed that to be at the center of all decision making was the shape strong leadership took. But even if that’s so, explanation is no excuse, and the reality is that now I meddle in too many things. And there must be something in me, some flaw, some weakness, that rises to meet the challenge in just this way. Other pastors I know have, in the face of many demands, committed the opposite sin: they’ve become dangerously passive. My sickness manifests as control. So it’s one area where I seek restoration

I want to return to my work slow to speak, quick to listen, slow to become angry. I want to hide more things in my heart and ponder them there. I want to return with a sharper instinct to pray, to watch and wait, and with less impulsiveness to act straightaway. I want a stronger conviction that, though God welcomes my honest efforts, he manages quite fine without my Peterlike outbursts of ill-conceived enthusiasm and then sudden loss of nerve, my opinion swapping and bully tactics, my reckless volunteerism to fix things for God and then desperate evacuation when things go wrong.

Excerpt from: "The Rest of God: Restoring Your Soul by Restoring Sabbath" by Mark Buchanan.