Do You Want to Be Healed?

There is a question Yeshua asked once that has never let go of me.

He was in Jerusalem, by a pool with five covered porches, where the sick and the blind and the lame lay in the shade, waiting for the water to stir. One man had been lying there thirty eight years. Thirty eight years in the same spot, watching other people get well.

Yeshua walked up to him and asked him something that sounds, at first, almost cruel.

And yet I have come to believe it is the most respectful question in all of Scripture.

Because healing is the one thing that cannot be done to a person against their will. God will not force it on anyone. The water can stir all day. The Healer can be standing close enough to touch. But until something inside a person says yes, I want to live, the miracle waits at the door. It knocks. It does not break in.

Now let me tell you the name of that pool, because it undid me the first time I understood it.

The house of mercy. The broken of the whole city carried themselves to the house of mercy, and waited there for the water to move.

And do you know what the man said when Yeshua asked him? He did not say yes. He said something sadder than no.

Thirty eight years, and the deepest wound was not in his legs. It was in that one word. No one. He had no one to carry him to the mercy that was right in front of him.

I think about that man every single weekend now. Because of what is happening on this hill.

You have read what this farm has quietly become. A small house of mercy of our own. A beit chesed on the Golan. The young people who walked out of the Nova festival alive and have been lying beside their own pool ever since. The soldiers. The ones who cannot close their eyes at night. They come to us for a day, for a weekend, and people who heal for a living give up their own rest to carry them down to the water.

And here is the thing I have seen with my own eyes, and it is holy.

Every one of them, before they ever arrived, had already answered the question. Somewhere under all the rubble, in a voice almost too quiet to hear, they had whispered yes. I want to be healed. I want to live. They got in the car. They came. That yes is the most sacred thing I witness all week.

But not one of them could reach the water alone. None of us can. And that is the other half of mercy, the half the world keeps forgetting.

Both of my families know this in their bones. The prophet said it in a single line that a Jew and a Christian can pray together without changing a word.

Love mercy. Ahavat chesed. Not admire it from a distance. Not feel it and move on. Love it the way you love a person, enough to stand up and do something. Enough to be the one who puts another body into the water.

So this week I am going to ask you the two questions of that pool, and I want you to carry both of them home.

The first is the one Yeshua asked. Do you want to be made well? Wherever you are still lying in the shade, whatever has had you pinned for your own thirty eight years, hear this. The house of mercy is open, and the One who asks is standing in front of you, and the yes is yours. No one can say it for you, and no one can stop you from saying it.

The second is the question the man's whole life was crying out. Who can you carry to the water? Whose face just came to your mind? Somewhere near you there is a person lying by a pool with no one to help them in. Be the someone. That is gemilut chasadim. That is mercy with hands. That is what heals a city, and a country, and a wall of watchmen scattered across the whole earth.

When you lift the Golan in your prayers, you are lifting a house of mercy on a hill, and the wounded inside it who are learning, slowly, to stand. You are one of the ones carrying them to the water. You always were.