Do You Desire To Become Whole?
On Facing The Boogeymen and Accepting Jesus' Invitation
Thirty-eight years. Thirty-eight. More than thirteen thousand sunrises and sunsets. Early on in his paralysis, his hope rose with the sun but it has long since set. Thirty-eight long years of unfulfilled desire to live and enjoy the life others take for granted. Thirty-eight years of soiling himself, with no one to help him bathe. Thirty-eight years of people walking past him, lying there either ignoring him or looking upon him with pity. He wasn’t sure which was worse. As the sun sets on yet another day, a man takes notice and approaches him.
“Do you want to be well,” the man asks.
What kind of question is this? Of course, he does! He’s wanted it for the last thirty-eight miserable years.
Still, he answers, “I can’t. I don’t have anyone to help me into the pool when the healing waters are stirred.”
“Get up. Take up your mat and walk,” the man says.
At that moment, muscles long atrophied gained strength, and he stood on his own two feet, a physically healed man.
The full story of Jesus healing the man by the pool of Bethesda (John 5:1-15) raises all kinds of practical and theological questions. Perhaps the question that most piques my curiosity is this: why does Jesus ask a person who has clearly suffered for a long time if he wants to be well? If he wants to be healed? While I know Jesus is purposeful in all he does, this question has always confounded me.
Until recently.
I’ve been on a journey of healing since I entered recovery from drug addiction in 1996. And after twenty-eight years, two things are clear. First, healing is a life-long journey and not a destination. It’s peeling the onion—one layer at a time—with each layer getting closer to the core of our pain. Second, the healing process is just plain hard, even daunting, which helps Jesus’ question make a little more sense.
Our answer to his question, which could also be translated as, “Do you want to become whole?” isn’t always a definitive yes, but more like a tentative maybe. More than likely, what we want is relief. Relief from pain, dis-ease, and discomfort that fester from unhealed fractures. We want the fruit of healing and wholeness without all the hard work it can require.
Facing The Boogeymen
If you’ve followed my writing for long, you’ve likely heard me talk about a Jim Collins quote from his book Good to Great, in which he explores what hinders good leaders from becoming great leaders. In an interview with one high-capacity leader, the leader said that his job is to look under the rocks at the squiggly things beneath, even if those things scare the hell out of you. The same can be said about healing. We have to look at the squiggly things in our stories. But to do so means we have to, once again, answer Jesus’ question, “Do you want to become whole?” Because in order to become whole, to be healed, we have to face all those boogeymen lingering in the shadows. And that takes a whole lot of courage.
We each have our own specific boogeymen, but four common ones are fear, shame, discomfort, and futility.
Fear
Fear haunts. Healing from mental, emotional, relational, and spiritual fractures can be a daunting process. Who really wants to unlock things they’ve long since buried or hidden from view? Or go digging around in the dark chambers of our hearts and minds, uncovering unfulfilled longings, disappointments, and hurts?
Fear casts shadows on hope with questions of, “What if…?”. What if I fall apart? What if I can’t handle it? What if others reject or abandon me? What if I break down? What if it disrupts my relationships?
Shame
Shame taunts. The boogeyman of shame lobs verbal grenades of contempt and condemnation aimed right at the core of our being—our identity and place in the world.
“I should be”
“I’ll never be…”
“I can’t believe I am still…”
“I’m being stupid…”
“I just need to get over it…”
Shame isolates you, steals your voice, and delegitimizes your pain. It immobilizes you. Because how can there be any hope of healing when the issue is who you are—not what you have done or what has been done to you?
Discomfort
Physical wounds require appropriate care. If untreated, a wound can become infected, heal improperly, and even cause death. It’s necessary, but it isn’t comfortable. They have to be cleaned out and treated with an antiseptic. Sometimes pressure has to be applied to stop the bleeding. On some occasions, they require stitches, staples, or even surgery.
The same is true with mental, emotional, relational, and spiritual wounds. They need appropriate care, but in order to be healed, they need to be revealed. And both the revealing and the healing hurt. It requires confronting and re-evaluating long-held narratives, setting boundaries, identifying old response patterns, and establishing new ones. It’s committing to honesty with yourself and your community about both your sin and your suffering. It’s time spent in prayer, the Scriptures, journaling, and therapy. Healing is hard work; at times, it’s even grueling, like pushing a boulder up a mountain.
Futility
Futility is perhaps the biggest boogeyman of them all. Futility is the belief that it's useless, that healing is beyond hope. The language of futility sounds like defeat:
“It’s too much.”
“What’s the use?”
“Why bother?”
“I can’t change any of it anyway.”
“It won’t make any difference.”
“Nothing ever changes.”
“It’s pointless.”
Futility leads to resignation, which is a counterfeit to acceptance. Ultimately, resignation robs us of the wholehearted life Jesus invites us to.
The Work of Healing
Healing is hard work. But, if we are honest with ourselves, don’t we work just as hard to manage our fractures? We use tactics like denial and avoidance to sidestep the fear and discomfort of healing. We devise a thousand excuses and reasons why it isn’t practical, necessary, or worthwhile. And when the pain inevitably bubbles to the surface, we stuff and escape through whatever means possible—food, pornography, alcohol, and retail therapy—to soothe our unsettled souls. We even use good things like work, relationships, exercise, or our kids to distract us or convince ourselves we’re okay.
Untended wounds are active, no matter how much we try to deny, dismiss, or avoid them. I’ve heard author and therapist Jay Stringer often say, “If you do not transform your pain, you will always transmit it. Always someone else has to suffer because I don’t know how to.”¹ The ripple effects of our wounds and brokenness extend far beyond the initial pain point, coming out sideways at anyone—friends, family, co-workers, neighbors, and even strangers—who brush up against our tender places.
Jesus' question to the paralytic at the pool of Bethesda is the same question he asks us: “Do you want to become whole?”
What would it look like to be open to healing instead of settling, striving, and stuffing?
There is no magic formula or clean process for healing. It is a long and winding road with surprising twists and turns along the way. But just as we have tools to tend to a physical wound, we also have tools to address soul wounds.
Revealing
Revealing is a severe mercy; it’s the grace of God unearthing an unhealed place in us and inviting us to entrust ourselves to his healing hand.
This is where curiosity is an invaluable tool. When a pain point has been exposed, what would it look like to respond with curiosity rather than condemnation? To ask myself questions:
Why did I react that way?
What am I afraid of at this moment?
What do I want that fear I won’t get in this situation?
Am I reacting to this situation, or is it revealing a past hurt that longs for tender care?
Where am I hearing the haunts and taunts of fear and shame?
When we allow curiosity to shape our inner dialog rather than self-condemnation or attacking and blaming others, we may find Jesus’ hand pressing on the thing he longs to heal.
Naming Our Hurts and Our Longings
A good doctor doesn’t mend a broken arm with blood pressure medicine. Accurately naming the wound, which includes naming the unmet longing or desire behind it, enables us to tend to it with care.
If your spouse had an affair, the wound may have been betrayal, but perhaps the deeper pain is the unmet longing for love, acceptance, or emotional security. If a friend disappears and cuts off communication, the wound may be rejection or abandonment, but the core of the wound is the unmet desire to belong, be known, and be loved.
Dr. Dan Allender once said that when we think of our stories and our pain, we shouldn’t compare them to those of others but to that of Eden. I’ve found that to be helpful in unearthing the core desire. What in your story was lost when compared to the perfection of Eden?
Lamenting Our Pain and Brokenness
Once we’ve named the wound, we can grieve the loss, which is a necessary part of the healing process. But grief is messy; it can’t be managed or tamed. Only experienced as it presents itself—sometimes as anger, sometimes sorrow, sometimes confusion. To lament, to give voice to your grief is to tell the story of your pain as honestly as you can in this particular moment. It is to wrestle with God on holy ground, grappling to accept God and his ways on his own terms, knowing all the while that there is no safer place to hurl your grief than our compassionate, suffering Savior.
The psalmists teach us well how to hold the tension of grief and gratitude, fear and faith, pain and promise—communicating their darkest thoughts and deepest agony while also fiercely clinging to the God who sees, hears, and responds. The psalmists remind us that we can be brutally honest with God about our pain while faithfully honoring him as our Lord.
Repenting Our Sin
Sometimes our pain is the result of our own choices, the consequences of our sin. Perhaps we are navigating the pain of divorce because of our own infidelity. Maybe we lost a friendship because we betrayed a confidence. Or our idolatry of work has resulted in tense relationships with our adult children. Whatever pain our sin has caused, even here, the Lord has not left us without a path to healing.
Repentance requires honest self-evaluation. It is an unwillingness to make excuses for yourself and invites God to examine you and reveal anything within you that needs to be mended. It is to specifically name your failing, take responsibility for the fallout it caused, and turn in a different direction.
Accepting
Acceptance is a vital step toward healing. It requires honesty and courage. It evaluates the circumstances and discerns what can or cannot be changed. It is willing to to stare down the boogeyman, look at all the squiggly things, and pursue healing, but has also made peace with the truth that life isn’t always fair or easy and pain is inevitable.
Trust are the roots of acceptance. Acceptance isn’t fatalistic or defeatist. Whereas resignation devolves into futility and loss of hope, acceptance builds toward contentment and peace. Resignation looks at the hard and says, “It is what it is” but acceptance looks at Jesus and trusts that all things, including your pain, matter to him and are in his tender, loving hands.
The Now and the Not-Yet of Healing
The healing of the paralytic by the pool of Bethesda was an in-breaking of the kingdom of God, pointing to the God who has power over all things, including sickness, disease, death, and bodies that have been disabled for thirty-eight years. And while Jesus may have physically healed him, he was not yet whole. There were still layers of sin, pain, and brokenness to be tended, as perhaps indicated by Jesus’ later interaction with him (John 5:9-17).
This is the now and the not-yet of healing. All those Jesus physically healed during his ministry still died. They still lost loved ones to death. They still suffered injustice, relational fractures, broken systems, temptations toward sin, and even great persecution. The same is true for us. Jesus may significantly, even completely, heal some aspects of our lives here while other aspects he may heal incrementally over time. And some, like Paul’s thorn, he chooses to let remain. But even those painful parts of our stories that continue to be tender are fruitful toward our becoming whole (2 Corinthians 12:1-10).
Some of us have been heavy-laden with the pain of grievous things for decades—neglect, abuse, trauma, loss of children, betrayal, or chronic mental, emotional, or physical challenges. While you may continue to feel the impact of and grieve what you lost or what was done to you for the rest of your life, where might Jesus be inviting you toward another part of the healing process, toward wholeness?
Some of us have been crippled by our addictions to alcohol, sex, relationships, or work—much of which are ineffective strategies to escape and manage pain. Jesus’ offer of wholeness is for you as well. What would it look like to accept his invitation and take a step?
All of us are navigating the inevitability of pain in a broken world, everything from hurt feelings to unfulfilled desires. And Jesus’ invitation to us is the same.
So, the question remains. Will you dare to face the boogeymen? Will you dare to hope for a glimpse of the in-breaking kingdom in your life? Will you, even with fear and trembling, accept his invitation to mend the tender places?
Where are you suffering? What are you grieving? What are you longing for? ¹
The answers to these questions may reveal those tender places Jesus longs to heal.
Do you want to become whole?
Love you guys!
CC
¹ I was given these three questions during my participation in one of Dr. Curt Thompson’s confessional communities. If you are interested in learning more about or participating in a confessional community you can get more information here. Dr. Thompson’s clear love for Jesus and his work on the intersection of faith and interpersonal neurobiology has been a gift to me personally and to the body of Christ. You can also listen to his podcast, Being Known, on any podcast platform or check out his books here.
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Thank you, Chrystie.