GOD OF FURNACES

But you've been crippled for thirty-eight years. For thirty-eight years, you've been bathed by rain and dried up by the scorching Jerusalem sun. You can only walk in your mind; in the dark alleys of your mind, you see yourself tapping your feet to the rhythm of soft music. You see yourself chasing your then four-year-old daughter in your garden and catching her with long strides. You don't know how she is now because you have not seen her since you became a cripple, since your new home became a cane stretcher a few metres from the pool of Bethseida. This life must be a set up. Everything is against you, even the elements. Whenever that angel walks to the pool with studied calmness and stirs it, no one agrees to throw you in. So for thirty-eight years, you have watched cripple after cripple emerge from the pool with complete limbs, flinging their crutches and running home to their families as brand new men. You are just two metres from the pool, but for thirty-eight years you could not get in, because you had no man.
Then one day, this man walks up the serpentine Jerusalem road. He is dressed in a black shirt and jean trousers, a white earpiece is stuck in His ears. He is nodding to the rhythm of whatever He is listening to and looking at you fixedly at the same time. You think of asking Him to help throw you into the pool, but you change your mind immediately. You've tried that for thirty-eight years with no luck. You try to avert your gaze, but you can't take your eyes off Him. He walks up to you and the first thing you notice is that the magic pool which has been stirring all evening stops; game recognises game. He takes off the earpiece and asks, Do you want get well?
You are already lost in a quandary of inarticulateness, but you manage to mutter, "I have no man. " Then He tells you to carry your cane stretcher and go home. You want to curse Him for daring to mock your disability, but wasn't He the same man that made the pool to stop swirling, a pool that had been swirling for thirty-eight years? He nods a "go ahead" at you, and although you have no reason to, you make to stand up for the first time in three decades. Then you feel your bones humming and holding one another by the shoulder, dusting their garments and jolting to life. Then you feel little tissues arranging themselves in single files, the way school children file themselves during morning assembly. Then you feel dead cells being suctioned out of you, replaced by a vitality you cannot describe. Then you stand, for the first time in thirty-eight years, wobbling and taking baby steps. You see, learning to walk again is an art. Every step is beautiful in its uncertainty, every step charts a new course to a brighter promise.
For you, because He may not be on your time, but He's never late. For you; because your faith may be in smithereens, but He doesn't mind. He does these things because He can, because He wants to. For you; because Jesus is passing this way.