IMAGINE SITTING IN the same spot on the ground day after day. You cannot get on your feet without assistance from other people. You have paralysis in both legs and need help with many of the basic functions that most people take for granted, such as bathing, dressing, and preparing meals. You feel powerless most of the time, at the mercy of a crippling physical condition that has plagued you for almost forty years.
At times you feel angry and resentful, even bitter, as you watch others casually stroll by without even a glance your way. Other times you feel so desperate as you cling to the last gossamer strand of hope for your life to change. You have heard of a place where miracles happen, where apparently a heavenly angel skims the surface of one of the temple pools. Right after the angel departs, the waters ripple with motion and drench the next person who manages to wade into the pool with miraculous healing.
You have been coming to this miraculous spot for years and years. But you move far too slowly to ever be the first one in the water after it has been stirred by an angel. You have watched others shriek with joy as injured limbs become whole, as diseased bodies return to health, as eyes and ears once blind and deaf now see and hear. It has become almost too painful to watch others receive what you long to have, what you struggle to continue to hope for, while each day, the muscles in your legs atrophy and weaken just a little more. Each day, your hope withers.
Then one day a stranger comes by and asks you the oddest question, “Do you want to get well?” It almost insults you at first, but then you think perhaps He does not realize your condition or the extent of the problem logistically. You try to explain that every so often an angel stirs up the waters, and the first person to go into the water experiences his or her corresponding healing or miracle. Even as you speak, you wonder if perhaps this stranger—He certainly looks young and strong—perhaps can finally help carry you to be the first one into the pool.
But He does not even offer.
Instead He does something no one has ever dared.
He tells you to get up and walk …