If you speak to enough people who are not well you eventually learn that some unwell people first need to be asked, ‘Do you want to get well? Do you truly want to be healed?’
Jesus met a man who for 38 year had been waiting to be healed of his disability. When Jesus heard this man’s story, we are told that the first question he asked him was, ‘Do you want to get well?’ When the man answered that he did, but that he was unable to do so because of his disability, Jesus told him, ‘Get up!’ Healing required the man’s desire to be healed and Jesus’ power to be heal. (John 5:1-8)
If you have become spiritually or emotionally paralyzed by a year of isolation and arguing over masks and social distancing and political rhetoric, Jesus might be asking you today, ‘Do you want to get well?’ Do you prefer to wallow in your misery and spend another year complaining and arguing with your neighbors, or do you want to be healed as a community?
Jesus is offering us what seems as close as you can get to a modern-day miracle of science and medicine: a shot in the arm. A vaccine to give us more freedom to move about in society again.
There are some who cannot or will refuse to receive the vaccine for a variety of reasons. But the beauty of God’s creation is that the ‘herd’ can create immunity for all, the vaccinated and the non-vaccinated. Jesus is asking us if we really to be healed, if we, as a society, as a community, really want to get well.
When your turn to get in the healing waters comes, are you willing to respond to Jesus’ invitation to receive healing, ‘Get the shot?’
For some the answer is ‘no.’
But I am praying that 80% of our communities will respond to Jesus’ invitation
with a resounding ‘Yes Jesus, we want to get well, to get the shot, to start
living again.’
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