Do You Want to Be Well?
A Reflection on Healing, Allowing, and the Step That Is Ours
There is a story in the Christian scriptures — it is found in John’s Gospel — of a man who had been ill a long time, waiting by a pool called Bethesda. It was said that when the water was stirred, the first one into the pool would be made well. And Yeshua, coming upon him, asks a single question: Do you want to be well?
The man does not answer it. He does not say yes. Instead he explains why he cannot — that whenever the water is stirred, someone steps down ahead of him, and he has no one to carry him in. He answers a question about his own longing with an account of what others are doing to him.
We know this move. We make it often. We look at what is being done to us, and we hand our healing to it. It is my work. It is my family. It is my commitments, my obligations, the ones who get there first. And so, like the man at the pool, we remain as we are — not because healing is far off, but because we have decided, without quite deciding, that it rests with someone else.
Yeshua’s question cuts underneath all of that. Not what are they doing to you — but do you want to be well?
And here is the thing easy to miss. When the man is healed, he does not heal himself. He does not earn it, arrange it, or bring it about. The Gospel tells us, a little further on, that he did not even know who had healed him. The gift comes to him while he is lying down. What is asked of him is not to make the healing happen. What is asked is the one thing that is his to give: to rise. To take up his mat. To let the word land somewhere inside him, and to answer it.
There is another story, older, in the Hebrew scriptures. Naaman, a Syrian commander, a powerful man, contracts leprosy. Through a chain of unlikely voices — a servant girl, a king, a prophet’s messenger — he is told what to do. Wash in the Jordan seven times. And Naaman is offended. The Jordan? He thinks of the great rivers of his own country, broad and beautiful, and he nearly turns for home. Why this small, muddy, unremarkable river? Why this small, unremarkable thing?
It is only because there is wisdom around him — a companion who says, plainly, if he had asked you to do some great thing, would you not have done it? — that Naaman stops. He goes down. He stoops to the insultingly small thing. Seven times. And he is clean.
Notice what his part was. Not to accomplish anything great. His part was to surrender the great thing he wanted to do, and to allow the small thing he was given. In the stooping, the healing.
This is what we keep missing. We are forever looking beyond, for the next great thing — some concept, some practice, some formula that will finally deliver. When The Secret came and went, and manifestation was on every tongue, many took it up for a season and then set it down, disappointed, and said it did not work. But it was never the formula that was the trouble. It is that we keep looking for something major to do, when the whole of it is often standing quietly in front of us, asking only to be received. The simplicity is what fools us.
I know this in the smallest way, in my own days. You are looking for something — an object, right there in the room — and you cannot see it. You ask another to help, and they walk to the very place you have already looked, and lift it, and say, here. And you are astonished. We look past the very thing we are looking for. We search hard for what is already in front of us.
The man at the pool was watching the water, waiting to wrestle his way in ahead of the others — and did not see that the One who could heal him was already standing before him.
So this is the whole of it, and it is simple — though simple is not the same as easy. Look with intention. Look at what is presenting itself, moment by moment, day by day. Do not despise the small steps — the little experiences, the little openings, whose end you cannot yet see. Take the step that is in front of you. It will carry you further than all the waiting for the great one ever could.
And so I take up my part. My responsibility is not to make the healing happen — that is not mine to make, and never was. The gift has already been given; it is eternally extended; it stands in front of me as it stood before the man at the pool. My responsibility is the one thing that is always, only mine: to stop handing my healing to others, to stop hiding behind what they have or have not done — and to turn. As a thing set crosswise in a current turns, and stops blocking the water, and lets it have its way. To allow. To let the word land somewhere within me, and to rise.