“Now there is in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate a pool, in Aramaic called Bethesda, which has five roofed colonnades. In these lay a multitude of invalids—blind, lame, and paralyzed. One man was there who had been an invalid for thirty-eight years.”
When Tom and I traveled to Iceland last year, we visited the famous geysers – these extraordinary thermal springs where scalding water would suddenly erupt from the earth in massive, towering displays. Around the main geyser, smaller hot springs bubbled and steamed in the frigid air. Tourists huddled in thick parkas, cameras ready, waiting for the next eruption that would signal healing waters were on the move. We’d been told the exact timing was unpredictable but worth the wait.
The wait was slightly unbearable. Not only was it frigid, it was raining. Fingers numbed. Patience thinned. Right before I was willing to plead my case for the warmth of the car, it erupted. The eruption was shocking, the sight was breathtaking.
The irony wasn’t lost on me – I was ready to abandon my watch after a few uncomfortable minutes, while the man, crippled since birth, at the Pool of Bethesda had persisted for thirty-eight years.
Picture this – the morning light slants through the five colonnades surrounding the Pool of Bethesda, casting long shadows across the gathered bodies. Among them, a man shifts his weight on a weathered mat that has molded itself to his form over decades. His eyes follow the ripples on the water’s surface with practiced vigilance. Thirty-eight years of waiting have taught him to recognize even the subtlest movement that might signal the angel’s stirring of the healing waters.
Thirty-eight years. Nearly four decades of rising hope and crushing disappointment. Of watching others rise from their mats while he remains. The theologian Henri Nouwen might describe this as a “waiting with passionate patience” – but for our man at the pool, passion has long since cooled into resignation. Psychologically, we understand this as learned helplessness – the gradual surrender to circumstances that seem beyond our control, until even opportunity becomes invisible to us.
Each of us carries our own thirty-eight-year wound – perhaps not in duration, but in depth. We position ourselves at the edges of potential transformation: the church seat we’ve occupied for decades without inner renewal, the self-help books that line our shelves unread, the therapy appointments where we perform our pain without surrendering to the process, or the therapy appointments we refuse to make because we are too afraid of what might be revealed.
That is our shadow work we’re avoiding.
We often prefer the familiar suffering to the uncertain liberation beyond it.
The edge of Bethesda represents what mystics call liminal space – that threshold between what has been and what might be. Our nameless man had built an entire identity around this edge-dwelling. His daily rituals of arranging his mat, nodding to fellow sufferers, watching the water – these had become not just habits but the entire nature of his being. To leave the poolside would require more than physical healing; it would demand the death of the self he had become.
Isn’t this our deepest fear?
That healing might cost us the identity we’ve carefully constructed around our wounds? As Thomas Merton observed, “We may spend our whole life climbing the ladder of success, only to find when we reach the top that our ladder is leaning against the wrong wall.” Our man’s ladder leaned against Bethesda’s wall for thirty-eight years, while his true healing waited elsewhere.
What waters are you watching today?
What ripples have captured your desperate attention while the true Source of transformation stands unnoticed behind you?
Divine intervention rarely follows our carefully constructed timelines and strategies.
The great paradox of spiritual transformation is that it often arrives not when we’ve perfected our approach to the water, but when we’ve exhausted our illusion of control.
In the sacred silence of this Lenten season, can you hear the gentle question being asked of your soul: “Are you ready to look away from the water?”
Prayer: Ancient of Days, who holds my moments and years in Your hands, I confess the places where my waiting has calcified into resignation. Illuminate the edges where I sit, clutching familiar pain rather than surrendering to Your unfamiliar grace. Break open my thirty-eight-year narratives. Help me recognize where I’ve made peace with conditions You desire to transform. May I release my timeline without abandoning expectancy, and remain open to Your approach, even when it arrives in forms my wounded imagination could never conceive. In the name of the One who sees me at the water’s edge, Amen.