Article September 19, 2011 Issue

Prayer on the apartment hunt

By Jodie Swales

My husband and I had moved to Switzerland from Australia last summer for my new teaching job. The school I was working for had temporarily rented us an apartment, but it turned out to be awful. It seemed like the perfect disaster. The city we moved to, Lausanne, was well known for its lack of suitable accommodation, and everyone was telling us of the many days and even months we would have to spend in order to find a permanent apartment. We were told that because there were so many people looking for apartments, even if we found one we liked, chances were we would miss out on it. Someone would get it before us.

One morning, I decided I was going to pray for all the people looking for a home in the city—and in particular, the homeless people I had seen on a daily basis. One of the verses I loved from the Bible Lesson that day was the promise that I “dwell in the house of the Lord for ever” (Ps. 23:6).

Soon after, a very strong thought came to me to look at the story in the Bible about the man at the pool of Bethesda (see John 5:2–9). The story goes that there was a crippled man, waiting at a pool that was reported to have healing properties. An angel would supposedly come down and touch the water and the first person to touch the water after that would be healed. The rest would miss out. Jesus came to the crippled man and asked him if he would be “whole.” Reading this story, it seemed to me that the man gave Jesus a lot of excuses why he couldn’t be healed. He said he had no one to help him get to the water, and that while he was trying to get there, someone else got in before him and he missed out.