“A woman in the crowd had suffered for 12 years with constant bleeding. She had suffered a great deal from many doctors, and over the years she had spent everything she had to pay them, but she had gotten no better. In fact, she had gotten worse. She had heard about Jesus, so she came up behind him through the crowd and touched his robe.”
The story of the bleeding woman has echoed through my life for years, and it’s the backstory that I daydream about—the life of this woman before her encounter with Christ. The writers of the Gospels note, calmly and evenly, that she had been bleeding for 12 years. But I can’t read those lines without wondering about the substance of those days. Because not only had she been bleeding for 12 years, she had been waiting for 12 years. And waiting is not a calm and even business.
If you’ve ever waited for something you’ve dearly wanted—a healing, a relationship, emotional breakthrough, financial security—you know the vulnerability and tenderness that waiting brings. The bleeding woman experienced those things: She had been waiting for healing for over a decade. She suffered from physical pain as well as emotional trauma; her bleeding left her unclean according to the Law, unable to participate in communal life. She would have been lonely and exhausted—and she could have been very bitter.
But through all those years of waiting, it seems that hope still flickered in the bleeding woman’s soul because when Jesus came to town, she had enough courage to try again—to reach out for healing again, to believe again, to hope again.
If you’ve been praying the same prayer and waiting for God’s answer for a long time, don’t give up reaching out to God in hope. Ask the Lord to help you respond like the bleeding woman—with an unflinching hope in him, even when you haven’t seen anything change for years. Like her, while we don’t know how or when the Lord is going to move on our behalf, we can continue to make the choice to reach out to him, trusting in his goodness and love.
Reflect:
Contemplate Mark 5:25–27. Why is it so powerful that the bleeding woman reached out to Jesus after all her years of waiting?
Pray:
Where in your life do you need the Lord to renew your hope as you wait on him? Invite the Holy Spirit to refresh your hope in God, regardless of your circumstances.
While we pray for peace, we need moral clarity about this war.
We’ve got little information on Jesus’ appearance and personality. But that’s the way God designed it.españolFrançais
After lobbying from fellow Southern Baptists and Christians affected by the war, the House speaker moves a package forward.
